Marine Le Pen’s bid to run for the French presidency in 2027 now rests with the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, which can let her conviction stand or quash it and order a new trial.
The Paris Court of Appeal upheld Le Pen’s conviction on July 7 in the National Front assistant’s affair, then trimmed the sentence enough to preserve her ability to run.
Le Pen’s original criminal conviction was for misappropriation of public funds, and arose out of allegations that she used money appropriated for European Parliament assistants to pay the salaries of her party’s national staff.
Her original sentence was reduced on appeal to one year of house arrest wearing an ankle bracelet, and her ban on running for public office was reduced to 15 months, enabling her to run in the 2027 election.
The Court of Cassation is a court of law, not of fact. It will not reweigh the evidence but examine whether the law was correctly applied.
For now, Le Pen is eligible and is campaigning without wearing the electronic tag, because the appeal suspends the ruling while the highest court weighs it.
A Question of Timing
In a statement published July 8, the court said it could rule as late as April 2027, days before the first election round on April 18, a turn that pits her candidacy against the calendar.However, Alexis Bavitot, a French business criminal law attorney and lecturer at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, told The Epoch Times there is no certainty the case will be ruled on before the election.
“In its statement, the court said it could rule before that date but did not say it would,” he said, noting factors the court cited as capable of stretching the timeline, such as the filing of supplementary briefs. “This is very common in business criminal law. Such cases usually take a year to a year and a half to settle.”
Should the high court quash the conviction, the case would return to a fresh appeals court, which could revisit the same questions. That review would run past the 2027 election, removing any legal obstacle to Le Pen’s candidacy whatever it eventually found.
If the appeal is rejected by the high court, the Paris prosecutor’s office will forward the case to the sentence enforcement judge in Le Pen’s area of residence, who will set the terms of the electronic monitoring bracelet.
Timing would be decisive, legal experts told The Epoch Times.
“Much depends on the date of the Court’s decision,” Bavitot said. “Justice is never disconnected from social realities. Fitting a bracelet six months before an election is not the same as fitting one a week before.”
A single judge imposing the device on the frontrunner days before the first round seems unlikely, he added, though it remains a possibility.
That judge has four months from the final conviction to summon Le Pen and set the terms of the measure.
Noëlle Lenoir, a French lawyer and former member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest constitutional authority, told The Epoch Times that Le Pen’s move to the Court of Cassation is, legal questions aside, “a political masterstroke.”
The appeals court, Lenoir noted, effectively handed the candidacy question back to Le Pen: She was convicted, but in the name of voters’ freedom of choice, she kept her eligibility. “This can be viewed as the judges attempting to shield themselves and the justice system from accusations of playing politics,” she said.
By appealing, Le Pen pushes the deadline as close to the election as possible: “Should her appeal be dismissed late, the sentence enforcement judge might have to impose the bracelet only during the final weeks, or even days. And that could prove disastrous for the image of a justice system accused of being politicized,” she said, adding, “That reality might sway the enforcement judge’s decision.”
Her lawyers also have delaying options of their own to stave off the bracelet, Bavitot noted. They could request a suspension of the sentence on professional grounds, under Article 720-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, citing the exceptional position of a presidential candidate in April.
Chirac, who died in 2019, was found guilty in 2011 of misappropriation of public funds and breach of trust in one strand of a case over allegedly fictitious jobs at the City of Paris.
No ankle monitor could be fitted at the Élysée, Bavitot said, and the sentence would wait until the electoral mandate ended.The Heart of the Appeal
Le Pen’s case for the Court of Cassation targets Article 432-15 of the penal code, the misappropriation-of-public-funds offense she was convicted under and which, she says, does not fit the facts.She argues that using parliamentary assistants for national rather than strictly European politics does not amount to embezzlement of public funds.
“Her line of argument relies on a strict interpretation of the Criminal Code,” Lenoir said. Le Pen will contend that a member of Parliament is neither a holder of public authority nor a person charged with a public-service mission, as the text requires, she said.
“The preceding provision, Article 432-14, which punishes favoritism, expressly refers to a person ’vested with a public elective mandate.' This third category is omitted from Article 432-15. The legislature knows how to name elected officials when it means to, so one can argue an MP is not the same as a person entrusted with a public mission,” she said.
“The argument was not previously upheld, but it is not an absurd one,” she added.
Whether the highest court agrees is the crux of the appeal.
However, Bavitot pointed out that a conservative candidate in the 2017 presidential election had made a similar argument, one the criminal chamber already rejected.
The candidate, François Fillon, a former prime minister, was a frontrunner to become France’s next president. His candidacy collapsed after he and his wife were accused of arranging fictitious parliamentary jobs paid with public funds. A media scandal ensued, his support cratered, and Emmanuel Macron ultimately won the presidency.
Nevertheless, Bavitot noted that Le Pen may also raise arguments unrelated to the legal classification of the alleged offenses, drawing on the Fillon precedent.
“On that classification, Fillon’s argument had been rejected, but his appeal to the Court of Cassation succeeded on another ground: the reasoning behind his sentence was deemed insufficient. The judges, the court found, had failed to adequately individualize the penalty in light of his personal circumstances and clean record,” he said.
Still, “in criminal cases, more than 70 percent of appeals to the Court of Cassation are dismissed. A quashing of the decision therefore remains statistically rare,” he said.
For now, the appeal has delivered what Le Pen sought: a campaign without an ankle monitor, and the presumption of innocence until a final ruling. The calendar may have the last word.
