President of the parliamentary group of the Rassemblement National (RN) party, Marine Le Pen leaves the courtroom on the first day of a hearing in her appeal trial on suspicion of embezzlement of European public funds, in Paris on January 13, 2026.
Thomas Samson / AFP
Marine Le Pen has one month to convince judges that she is not a threat to French democracy.
The appeal trial of Marine Le Pen, who is being tried in the case of the Front National’s European parliamentary assistants, accused of having used European funds to pay staff for domestic political tasks, opened in Paris on Tuesday, January 13th. The stakes in this new legal episode are immense, as it will determine whether or not the national right-wing MP will be able to stand in the 2027 presidential election.
Last spring, Marine Le Pen, head of Rassemblement National’s (RN) parliamentary group, was sentenced in the first instance to five years of ineligibility with immediate effect for embezzlement of public funds, and to four years in prison, two of which were to be served under electronic tagging, and a fine of €100,000. At the time of the trial, she denounced the eminently political nature of her conviction—in particular because of the immediate application of the ineligibility sentence, which was not required by law but chosen by the magistrates with the obvious aim of preventing her from running in the next presidential election.
The RN MP obtained a retrial of her case on appeal in record time. Usually, appeal proceedings take much longer. The court has assured that the judgement should be handed down by the summer of 2026—early enough to allow her, if necessary, to calmly approach the presidential campaign, which is scheduled to start in the autumn. If she were to be definitively convicted, her deputy, the current president of the Rassemblement National (RN), would run in her place.
Upon her arrival at the court, Marine Le Pen took the stand to justify her appeal on the grounds of her complete good faith. “We had no sense that we were committing a crime when we hired our own assistants and shared them,” she explained.
The appeal ruling means that the case will start from scratch. Le Pen therefore has the opportunity to radically change her line of defence. During the first trial, she and her colleagues denied the facts. This time, she accepts that a mistake was made, but denies any intention to cause harm, pointing the finger at a new culprit: the European Parliament, which at no point raised the alarm about what was known to everyone and made public through the party’s communications and organisational charts. This is what some observers refer to as the “Kerviel precedent,” named after the Société Générale trader who lost the bank €4 billion through dubious speculative transactions and defended himself by pointing out that at no point did the bank raise the alarm about his actions, even though they were known. According to Le Pen, the European Parliament “did not play its role as a watchdog as it should have done. It was aware of all the facts. We never concealed anything,” she recalled.
This is a major strategic choice, which can be explained by her team’s in-depth analysis of the motivations behind the first trial. As Camille Aynès, a lawyer, explains in the Le Monde newspaper, the sentence of ineligibility was not motivated solely by the seriousness of the facts, but also by the ‘defence system’ used by the candidate, raising fears that she would reoffend if she ever came to power. This was an aggressive and determined defence strategy, based on a form of claimed impunity, which did not work the first time around. The multiple appeals lodged by the MP—with the Constitutional Council and the European Court of Human Rights—did not work in her favour either, giving the impression that she was challenging the authority of the judiciary and flouting the law, arguing that the case was exclusively political.
This time, Marine Le Pen—who has since changed some of her lawyers—has therefore chosen to change her tone and appear respectful of the law.
On the second day of the trial, Wednesday, January 14th, Le Pen scored her first symbolic victory. The prosecutor considered that Marine Le Pen had been unfairly convicted in the first instance for ‘complicity’ in relation to a dozen disputed contracts. If the court agrees with him at the end of the proceedings, the European Parliament will have to ‘repay’ the RN €1.4 million.
For now, the future remains highly uncertain. It is possible that Le Pen has already resigned herself to being excluded from the presidential race. If she is cleared, it will be a pleasant surprise. It remains to be seen whether her new strategy will bear fruit and allow her to wipe the slate clean.
While Marine Le Pen is aware that she must not appear vindictive or threatening, the feeling of political injustice remains very much present. For offences similar to those alleged against the RN and Le Pen, former minister François Bayrou was acquitted and the president of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has still not been brought to justice.
The trial, scheduled to last a month, is due to end on February 11th.
Hélène de Lauzun is the Paris correspondent for The European Conservative. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She taught French literature and civilization at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in History from the Sorbonne. She is the author of Histoire de l’Autriche (Perrin, 2021).
