Marine Le Pen faces crucial Paris appeals trial over misuse of EU funds

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen leaves the National Rally headquarters after a French court convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzlement and barred her from seeking public office for five years, Monday, March 31, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s political future hangs in the balance at an appeals trial in Paris which may damage her party’s ambitions of radically changing France’s direction through anti-immigration and nationalist policies.

Ms Le Pen started answering the judges’ questions on Tuesday as she seeks to overturn a March ruling that found her guilty of misusing European Parliament funds in the hiring of aides from 2004 to 2016.

She was given a five-year ban from holding elected office, two years of house arrest with an electronic bracelet and a further two-year suspended sentence.

If she is able to run, Ms Le Pen, 57, is expected to be among the top contenders in the 2027 presidential election, possibly the front-runner, according to opinion polls.

She finished runner-up to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022, making her one of the most experienced senior politicians in the country.

For the past 15 years, Ms Le Pen has been trying to bring the far right into France’s political mainstream, striving to remove the stigma of racism and antisemitism that has clung to the party.

Since 2024, her National Rally party has become the largest single political group in France’s powerful lower house of parliament, even though it fell short of an outright majority.

If Ms Le Pen is ruled ineligible, she has already designated her 30-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, as her successor in the presidential bid.

The National Rally and 11 of its officials, including Ms Le Pen, are accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides instead to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.

Some EU money was used to pay for Ms Le Pen’s bodyguard, as well as her personal assistant. Another aide worked as a graphic designer.

Ms Le Pen’s sister, Yann, also was paid as an EU parliamentary aide when she was in charge of organising the party’s big events.

Others worked as aides to party officials they had no employment contract with.

“That was how it was. It may have been reprehensible, questionable — the system was not ideal, I am aware of that — but all of those people were actually working,” Ms Le Pen said on Tuesday.

The legal proceedings stem from a 2015 alert raised to French authorities about possible fraud by Martin Schulz, then-president of the European Parliament.

Since the appeals trial opened last week, Ms Le Pen’s defence appeared focused on arguing the party may have made unintentional mistakes.

“We did not feel we had committed any offence,” Ms Le Pen told the court. She said European Parliament officials did not at the time tell her party that the way it was hiring people was potentially against any rules.

Faced with several emails mentioning details of internal meetings about hiring aides, Ms Le Pen said staffing choices were aboveboard and justified by the multiple tasks required of the party.

She also acknowledged some of the aides were “shared” by several elected officials for organisation purposes — no matter what their contracts stated.

“We pooled a certain number of aides — though not all of them. I note that over this entire 10-year period, the European Parliament never advised us nor reproached us for having aides who were obviously working with several MEPs,” Ms Le Pen said.

Regarding her bodyguard, “again, the European Parliament was aware he was a security officer”, she said.

A Paris court ruled in March that Le Pen was at the heart of “a fraudulent system” that her party used to siphon off EU Parliament funds worth 2.9 million euro. The ruling described the embezzlement as “a democratic bypass” unfair to competitors.

The court noted “the seriousness of the acts committed” and “the harm caused both to citizens’ trust in public life and to the interests of the European Parliament” to justify the sentence.

The judges handed down guilty verdicts to eight other current or former members of her party who, like Ms Le Pen, previously served as European Parliament politicians. Also convicted were 12 people who served as parliamentary aides and three others. Some did not appeal over the ruling.