PARIS — Marine Le Pen’s muted legal victory Tuesday leaves the far-right leader battered and bruised, but it also burnishes her reputation as France’s ultimate political survivor.
In an unexpected verdict, a three-judge panel upheld her conviction for embezzlement but reduced her five-year ban on running for office. The judges also sentenced her to a year of house arrest, which she said on Tuesday evening she would appeal.
Le Pen’s announcement Tuesday that she will stand as her party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election anyway means Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old protégé she had said would replace her, will now campaign alongside her as her prospective prime minister.
“I am the candidate for the presidential election,” she said on the French television channel TF1, with National Rally President Jordan Bardella as her lieutenant.
“We offer the French a duo, president and prime minister, and this duo is solid and has very strong convictions,” she added. “We are a winning ticket.”
Le Pen — a veteran of three previous presidential campaigns — is now set to once again lead her party in a fourth quest to seize one of the world’s most powerful offices, one that concentrates sweeping executive authority in the hands of a leader who oversees the globe’s seventh-largest economy, commands a nuclear-armed state and represents a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.
What remains unclear is whether Le Pen can succeed where she has thrice failed, especially with the added burden of another legal battle and a possible final criminal conviction.
While she is likely to have little trouble rallying the party faithful, polls taken before the verdict suggested she would likely make it to the second-round runoff but lose if she then faces off against a centrist candidate.
Resurrection
It is not the first time Le Pen has been written off as a political has-been — most notably after her disastrous 2017 debate performance against Emmanuel Macron — only to come back stronger.
Le Pen is “a better candidate than Bardella,” said an official belonging to Edouard Philippe’s center-right Horizons party. “She’s become a more reassuring figure and has widened her appeal.”
“This woman is very intelligent. She is not here by accident,” said far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon last month. “And if she is a candidate for the fourth time, there won’t be any sniggering about her as an opponent.”
Her supporters believe she now has her best shot yet at reaching the Elysée Palace. Since she lost to Macron in the 2022 runoff with 41 percent of the vote, her far-right National Rally has become the most popular party in the country.
Le Pen’s legal ordeal could even give her “a special aura” among supporters who see her as being persecuted, said Philippe Olivier, a member of the European Parliament with the National Rally.
But while it may prove a boost among the base, it could hamper her efforts to win over new voters, particularly those on the traditional conservative right.
Her opponents have already started rounding on her. Communist leader Fabien Roussel wrote online that “such a conviction … should prevent someone from standing before the French people as a candidate.”
‘Clarification’
The aftermath of the verdict is likely to trigger what political analyst Jean-Yves Camus called a “clarification” within the party.
“Their political platforms will not be the same,” said Camus, a specialist in the far right for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. “We have already seen divergences between Le Pen and Bardella.”
In the days before Tuesday’s court ruling, Le Pen appeared resigned to being forced out of the presidential race and ready to focus on helping Bardella win the presidency.
At her most recent political rally in the city of Liévin, one of her northern strongholds, she was filmed dancing, singing and quoting French resistance songs. “If the judicial system bans me from running in the presidential election, it’s with great energy, great conviction and great trust that I will support every day, and until victory, the candidacy of Jordan Bardella,” she said.
For many National Rally officials, as well as much of the wider political establishment, the conversation had already shifted to what a Bardella candidacy would look like, with some far-right figures going as far as to endorse the 30-year-old National Rally president.
Taking back control
As Le Pen reclaims full control of her party, she will have to address the policy differences that have fueled tensions within it in recent months.
While Bardella has supported Le Pen’s efforts to distance the far right from her father’s legacy, he also energetically courted conservative voters in an attempt to reinvent the party as a more conventional, business-friendly force. In surveys taken before the verdict, he had been polling ahead of his mentor.
Le Pen, who instinctively supports a strong, protectionist state, has pushed back on Bardella’s efforts to soften the party’s position on pensions and a windfall tax on energy firms.
“Marine Le Pen has a solid core of supporters and isn’t going to change much, whereas the other one [Bardella] we don’t really know what he stands for,” Arnaud Péricaud, Philippe’s spokesperson, said ahead of the verdict.