1 day ago
6
Europe|What We Know About Marine Le Pen’s Embezzlement Conviction
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/world/europe/marine-lepen-embezzlement-france.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The far-right French politician was a leading candidate to become the country’s next president, but has now been barred from running for public office for five years.
March 31, 2025, 12:08 p.m. ET
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far right and a leading candidate to become the country’s next president, has been barred from running for public office for five years, after she and her party were convicted of embezzling millions of euros of European Union funds.
Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, populist politician, was also sentenced to four years in prison — with two years suspended and two that could be served under house arrest — and fined 100,000 euros, or about $108,000. She has consistently denied any wrongdoing and will appeal the verdict, which would put her jail sentence and the fine on hold.
But the ruling against Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, threatens to ruin her plans to run for the presidency in 2027. She has spent years trying to soften her party’s image and move it into the mainstream by disavowing its antisemitic roots after succeeding her father as leader of France’s far right..
Who is Marine Le Pen?
Ms. Le Pen, 56, is an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who became the face of France’s far right after taking over the party in 2011 from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Ms. Le Pen has sought to detoxify the political movement he built by softening some of its policies, changing the name of the party from the National Front to the National Rally, publicly rejecting her father’s antisemitism — he was convicted by a French court of Holocaust denial for saying that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history — and trying to court disaffected voters.
Image
