French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has officially announced her candidacy for the 2027 presidential election. The declaration came Tuesday night during a national television broadcast, just hours after a Paris appeals court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds.
French hard-right leader Marine Le Pen has announced she will run for the presidency in 2027, confirming she will appeal to the country’s highest court against an embezzlement conviction that requires her to wear an electronic tag for a year.
“The campaign begins tonight,” she declared during a combative primetime interview on French television.
The National Rally (RN) leader emphasized that she would “pursue all legal avenues” to prove her innocence, confirming her intention to appeal to France’s top civil court, the Court of Cassation.
The appeal means the order to wear the electronic tag is suspended until the Court of Cassation delivers its verdict on the case which is expected early in 2027.
Hours before Le Pen’s television appearance, a Paris appeals court found her guilty of misusing €2.8 million (£2.4 million) in EU funds through a fake jobs scheme, but ruled that she could still stand for the presidency while wearing the tag.
The decision represents a remarkable political gamble and it puts an end to months of speculation that Le Pen would hand the candidacy to the 30-year-old president of her party, Jordan Bardella.
While Bardella did not immediately react to Le Pen’s announcement, the pair are scheduled to appear together at a market in the Sarthe region of northwest France on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, public prosecutors have also announced they will appeal the appellate court’s decision to reduce Le Pen’s sentences.
When asked whether there was any scenario in which she might not run, Le Pen was definitive: “No, there isn’t. I am here tonight to tell you I am a candidate for the 2027 election.”
She declared that her campaign would start immediately to “begin the rebirth of France” and made it clear that she would not change her mind.
Although Le Pen continues to maintain her innocence, she and a number of party colleagues have now been found guilty twice of a scam that she denied organizing, though she did admit during the trial that the party had made a “mistake.”
The Paris appeals court confirmed the initial ruling that between 2004 and 2016, she and several others had embezzled funds intended for members of the European Parliament, using the money instead to pay for party staff.
Her decision to announce her candidacy comes less than 10 months before the first round of the French presidential election, scheduled for April 18 and May 2, 2027.
The Court of Cassation is expected to take several months to reach a decision. If it ultimately confirms Tuesday’s verdict, Le Pen could find herself forced to wear an electronic tag just as the election campaign enters its most critical phase early next year a scenario that risks becoming both a political embarrassment and a major logistical handicap.
In the hours following Tuesday’s court verdict, Le Pen was locked in talks with Jordan Bardella, as well as her lawyers and party colleagues. Afterward, she and Bardella were driven to the studios of TF1 television for her announcement.
If elected, she stated that she and Bardella would govern together with her serving as president and him as prime minister.
“We have a solid partnership, we complement each other…We have offered the French a duo… that I believe is complementary, balanced, coherent, solid.”
She emphasized that Bardella had been by her side for years and that their cause was greater than either of them individually: “The tests we have gone through have made us stronger, both in will and in the quality of our work together.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s verdict, Le Pen had stated several times that she would not run for president if forced to wear a monitoring device, noting that she would not feel “totally free” to campaign.
Political opponents were quick to criticize her decision to press ahead with her candidacy despite the guilty verdict.
“Her candidacy, despite her conviction, is yet another reversal that damages the French people’s trust in politics,” Othman Nasrou, secretary-general of the right-wing Republicans, told the AFP news agency.
Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal also chimed in, noting that there is “obviously a moral dimension to this situation,” pointing out the gravity of running for the nation’s highest office with a criminal record and a sentence for the embezzlement of public funds.
Yet one of Le Pen’s primary rivals for the presidency, former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, remarked that while the choice to run ultimately rested with her, she had now been convicted twice and would have to justify her actions to the French electorate.
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When pressed on what she would do if her appeal to the Court of Cassation failed, Marine Le Pen deflected: “We will see, and the French will be the judge, because the good news from this evening is they will be free to choose.”
She was then reminded of her previous confidence last year when she claimed she would be entirely cleared on appeal an outcome that did not materialize.
“Everyone can be mistaken,” she countered. “Let us hope that the Court of Cassation is not mistaken.”
