On 31 March 2025, Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzling funds from the European Parliament, where she and 22 others had, for more than a decade, diverted public money, meant for EU parliamentary assistants, into the coffers of her party, the National Rally. She received a four-year sentence (two suspended), a €100,000 fine, and, most significantly, a five-year ban from standing for office. She has appealed, but the ban takes immediate effect. If it holds, she’ll miss the 2027 presidential election, for which she was again the frontrunner. Whether that marks the end of anything meaningful is doubtful.
The far right has always thrived on the aura of persecution, and the court has, knowingly or not, just given it another gift.
Le Pen’s successor, Jordan Bardella, 29 years old, perfectly gelled, fluent in the language of order and crisis, isn’t waiting to find out. The National Rally is now the largest single party in the French National Assembly. Bardella has already toppled one prime minister (Michel Barnier, a figure whose stiffness is rivalled only by the upholstery in the Senate), and now he’s going after the next. François Bayrou, centrist, placeholder, ghost of the old liberal order, may not last the year. A second no-confidence vote could follow. A snap election. Bardella as prime minister. It’s all possible, and Le Pen’s legal downfall may hasten rather than hinder that ascent.
There’s something depressingly familiar about the reactions. Trump: she’s guilty of “nothing more than patriotism.” Musk: “a dark day for democracy.” Farage, obviously, said it was proof of creeping tyranny. The Daily Mail called it a “Left-wing French Revolution,” as if the court were Robespierre and Le Pen a sans-culotte sent to the guillotine. The word “witch-hunt” has been thrown around like rice at a wedding. But what they’re lamenting isn’t Le Pen exactly, it’s the idea that one of theirs could be punished at all. That she’s become a symbol is more important than anything she actually did.
Was it political? In the technical, juridical sense—probably not. The evidence was there, the investigation long-running, the financial misconduct fairly brazen. The court even applied a law Le Pen herself had supported. That’s not irony, it’s ideology. the French state defending its own contradictions. But politics is not just what’s on the docket, it’s what happens around it. This is a country where ministers lie, loot, and return to the lecture circuit. Where presidential allies get decorous pardons. And here comes Le Pen, banned at the exact moment she might finally win. It may be justice. But of course it looks like strategy.
Politics is not just the content of a verdict, it’s also its context.
That ambiguity is the point. The court’s decision has provided exactly the story the far right wants to tell: that they are besieged outsiders, persecuted for telling hard truths, silenced by a decadent elite. The trial becomes another episode in the performance of grievance, Le Pen as victim, Bardella as inheritor. It’s less about legality than affect. The conviction isn’t just contested, it’s useful.
Bardella, meanwhile, has become the main character. He’s cleaner than Le Pen, more polished, less burdened by the stink of Vichy nostalgia. But he serves the same project: racialised authoritarianism with a democratic gloss. What’s changed is the form. The RN isn’t a family affair anymore, it’s a brand. Bardella speaks fluent algorithm. His TikToks go viral. He’s Instagrammed with his dog. He talks about the Republic like it’s a house in disrepair: white walls, steel locks, keep the strangers out. It plays.
Scandal has been metabolised into charisma. A conviction is just another kind of credential.
And while this unfolds, Macronism sits and fumes in its glass offices. The centrists, tired and proud, blame the left, as they always do. Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, which still holds a base among racialised youth, is treated as the true threat, dangerous, disloyal, Islamo-gauchiste. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party hovers somewhere between collapse and parody. The liberal press shrugs. What’s left is managerialism: tight budgets, pension cuts, civil police with too much time on their hands. That, and a deepening fear of the streets.
The conviction won’t stop anything. Because it was never about Le Pen. The material basis is still there, jobs gone, rents up, public life hollowed out, the familiar story. The fascist tendency doesn’t begin with rallies; it begins with the feeling that no one’s coming to help. That you are disposable, invisible, and correct to be angry. The judiciary can prosecute embezzlement. It cannot prosecute alienation.
Only mass politics can resolve the crises the judiciary merely records.
This is where the danger sharpens. The European far right is no longer insurgent. It’s organised. It’s networking across borders, shaping online culture, drawing in young men with phones and nothing to lose. It doesn’t need to take power by force. It waits for the centre to collapse, the left to hesitate. And when it moves, it does so with the full weight of the state’s failures behind it.
Bardella may well be prime minister before the year ends. Not because of a verdict, but because the order that produced him still governs. The fantasy is that the court has ended something.
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