Le Pen Declares She Will Run for French President Despite Court-Ordered Ankle Monitor

Marine Le Pen declared Tuesday night that she will run for the French presidency in 2027, hours after a Paris appeals court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Union funds but softened the penalty enough to keep her political career alive. "Tonight, I am a candidate for the presidential election," the 57-year-old National Rally figurehead told the TF1 television channel, adding defiantly, "My hands are clean."

The ruling from the Paris Court of Appeal, presided over by Chief Judge Michèle Agi, both punished and rescued the far-right leader. The court sentenced Le Pen to wear an electronic monitoring tag for one year and handed down a three-year prison term with two years suspended. Crucially, it reduced her ban from holding public office to 45 months — and because 15 of those months are already considered served, the barrier that a lower court erected in 2025 effectively falls away in time for the campaign.

The case stems from a long-running scheme in which the National Rally, formerly the National Front, was found to have misappropriated roughly 2.8 million euros ($3.2 million) over more than a decade by using European Parliament money to pay party staff in France rather than genuine parliamentary assistants in Brussels. All 11 defendants, including Le Pen, were convicted. "The facts are serious," the court declared.

Le Pen said she will take her fight to France's highest court, the Court of Cassation, arguing that the appeal suspends the electronic-monitoring order. "I will therefore campaign without an electronic bracelet," she said. The Court of Cassation could issue a definitive ruling before the first round of the presidential election in April 2027, with a runoff to follow in May.

The stakes are enormous for a movement that had begun preparing for life without its standard-bearer. Le Pen has appeared on a French presidential ballot in some form since 1988 — four times supporting her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and three times as a candidate herself — and had warned that missing 2027 would amount to "political death." Her 29-year-old protégé, European Parliament member Jordan Bardella, had been positioned to replace her at the top of the ticket if the ban held, an arrangement now shelved. President Emmanuel Macron, term-limited and unable to seek reelection, will not be on the ballot, leaving the race wide open at a moment when polls have consistently shown Le Pen among the front-runners. Critics of the ruling argued that trimming the disqualification allows a convicted politician to seek the nation's highest office; her supporters cast the original ban as a judicial attempt to remove the opposition's most popular figure by other means. The legal drama has already reshaped the contours of the campaign, forcing rival parties to plan for a Le Pen candidacy they had spent months assuming might never materialize. For now, the woman who has spent nearly four decades on the French political stage remains firmly at its center.