After an eleven-year investigation and a two month trial last autumn, Marine Le Pen and her 22 co-accused, among them 8 MEPs, were found guilty by a French court of embezzlement, having used €3 million of EU parliamentary funds to run their own party and pay the salaries of their party workers. Soon after the trial, Le Pen vowed to launch an appeal, claiming that the court’s decision was politically motivated and announcing her intention to fight it.

The charges brought before the court were not random accountancy mistakes, however. On Monday morning, for two hours, judge Bénédicte de Perthuis explained how she reached a verdict based on a wealth of evidence. For fourteen years, an ‘organized system’ aimed at syphoning EU taxpayers’ money was overseen by Marine Le Pen. This ‘systemic fraud’ had in fact been put in place by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen as early as 2004 and his daughter Marine simply continued it, ‘with authority and determination.’ In this scheme, ‘every parliamentary assistant benefited from fake contracts’. Among them was the bodyguard of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who never set foot in Brussels or Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, but also Marine Le Pen’s best friend and her sister Yann.

Considering the ‘gravity of the facts’, Marine Le Pen was thus sentenced to a four-year prison term (two years of home detention and two years suspended), a €100,000 fine, and a five-year ‘ineligibility’ with immediate effect. In other words, Marine Le Pen is barred from running in the 2027 presidential elections unless an appeal court and a new trial reverses the sentence before then, a scenario that seems unlikely in such a short time. The news provoked a political earthquake in France.

Many voices were quick to question the nature of the verdict: ‘Could this be a politically motivated condemnation?’ ‘Isn’t this dangerous to deny voters the right to elect or not the country’s most popular politician, currently polling at 37% of vote intentions in the first round of the next presidential elections?’ ‘Isn’t this judge exceeding her competences?’ The answer to this last point is no. A law (Loi Sapin II), which aimed at fighting corruption in all its forms, was passed in 2016 by an overwhelming majority of the French national assembly, precisely in order to give judges this new tool in their legal arsenal. And if Bénédicte de Perthuis chose to use it against Marine Le Pen, it is because she thinks the risks of ‘reoffending are real.’ Indeed, during their trial, Marine Le Pen and her co-convicted showed no remorse, no regrets, and simply refuted and denied the mass of evidence documenting the fraud.

Marine Le Pen’s partisans and, interestingly, a significant proportion of the French political class expressed their dismay or their unease at the verdict. Not surprisingly, Far Left Populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon disapproved of the judgement, saying that ‘only the people can disqualify a politician.’ Meanwhile, 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, chairman of the Rassemblement National, and a possible substitute for Marine Le Pen in the next 2027 presidential elections, didn’t mince his words: ‘French democracy has been executed today’. There is nothing Marine Le Pen’s clan likes more than the use of ‘formules choc’, a legacy of the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the Far-Right Front National party in 1972. Outrage, anger and a love for words were his trademark. Invited to speak on television a few hours later, Marine Le Pen went further: ‘They want to eliminate me’, she said, vowing to fight back in court, concluding ‘this is a dark day for democracy.’

But is it, really? Many in France would like voters to believe that institutions only serve the interests of a powerful elite against the people, but the justice system is independent and has just proved it; it is, in fact, the guarantor of democracy.

Tellingly, the first public reaction to the verdict, even before the judge had finished reading it, was the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who claimed that French democracy was being violated. Next came Victor Orban, who posted on X ‘Je Suis Marine’. The Hungarian premier was followed by Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni’s deputy and head of the Far Right Lega in Italy, and Elon Musk, both giving their support to Le Pen and attacking ‘Brussels’ and leftwing ‘radicals’.

After the verdict and the outraged reactions of Marine Le Pen and her clan, France’s social networks were deluged with clips of her interviews going back to the 1990s. In them, Marine Le Pen called for stricter laws to tackle corruption in public life, claiming that she and her party were the only ones in France to be morally ‘whiter than white.’ More recently, she demanded that a law makes any politician found guilty of embezzlement ‘ineligible immediately and for life’. Now, that’s a thought.