Marine Le Pen is down, but far from out

Choose your journalistic cliche: bombshell, earthquake, upheaval, cataclysm? All were deployed on Monday when Marine Le Pen, figurehead of France’s far-right National Rally (RN), faced her moment of destiny in a Paris courtroom.

Le Pen and 23 others were on trial for embezzling public funds through a fake jobs scam in which, over more than a decade, €4.8m (£4m) of European parliament cash meant for MEP’s assistants was siphoned off to pay RN party workers in France.

To nobody’s surprise, all were found guilty and handed heavy sentences: Le Pen got a four-year jail term, half suspended, and €100,000 fine. To the surprise of many, she was also barred from running for public office for five years, with immediate effect.

Hours later, as the frontrunner to succeed Emmanuel Macron in 2027’s presidential election was on TV attacking the decision as “political” and “a denial of democracy”, threats and insults had begun raining down on the judges.

Far-right allies around the world agreed. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” said Elon Musk, echoing the views of Viktor Orbàn in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and many others.

A decision on Le Pen’s appeal should come next summer. If the appeals court lifts the “immediate effect” of her ban, she could yet run in 2027 – albeit with a heavy corruption conviction that is unlikely to be overturned.

The evidence against Le Pen and her co-defendants was substantial, as Angelique Chrisafis explains: the court found there was “no doubt” the scheme used fictitious contracts to pay party workers in France, many of whom never set foot in Brussels.

Following a nine-week trial, the judges produced 150 pages of legal reasoning. The bottom line, paraphrased: Le Pen and the RN embezzled European taxpayers’ money and used it in France, thereby cheating in French elections.

She was, as this Guardian editorial put it, “caught bang to rights”. In the words of Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst: “The French justice system chose courage over surrender. The law was clear, and so was the court: no special treatment, no deference to the powerful, no using a candidacy for office as an excuse to break the law with impunity.”

French courts, as many observed, have previously convicted two former centre-right presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac, and two former prime ministers, François Fillon and Alain Juppé. So the RN can hardly complain of unfair treatment. That is unlikely to stop them doing so, however, and playing the victim could clearly produce big political dividends when it comes to voters who already feel convinced the system and its establishment elites are working in concert against them.

The “strategic weaponisation” of Le Pen’s legal setback has already begun, Le Monde noted, with the RN “launching a guerrilla war in the media that deflects from the facts of the case and marks a break with years of effort to ‘detoxify’ the party”.

It is, said political scientist Giorgios Samaras, an “alarmingly predictable playbook”, and it can work: in the US, Donald Trump “orchestrated a maddening comeback” after “dismissing all his legal challenges as politically motivated witch-hunts”.

In Romania, far-right populist Călin Georgescu, who won the first round of a presidential vote that was annulled over fears of Russian interference, has been barred from May’s rerun – but his replacement, George Simion, is leading in the polls.

Will it work in France? For the European Council on Foreign Relations, Célia Belin, Camille Lons and Paweł Zerka argue that, while Le Pen’s sentence may embolden anti-establishment narratives across Europe, it is not automatically a winner for the RN. “It poses major challenges to the party,” they wrote. “It contradicts Le Pen’s 13-year strategy to normalise the RN into a regular hard-right party ready to govern … which would be be deeply damaged by outcries of manipulation over the verdict.”

A couple of early polls suggest a victim strategy may not automatically pay off. One found 54% of respondents thought the ruling showed “French democracy works well”, and the other found 68% believed the ineligibility sentence was “normal”.

The new trade order

At 10pm CET this evening, Donald Trump will stand in the White House Rose Garden and unleash the barrage of tariffs that he calls “Liberation Day” – and that pretty much everyone else fears could spark a global trade war and reshape the world’s economy.

Trump being Trump (he has already announced and delayed tariff plans multiple times), nobody has much of clue what he will actually say, but EU officials are reportedly expecting a flat-rate, double-digit tariff on European imports.

A Guardian YouGov poll found that between 56% and 79% of people across seven western European countries would be in favour of retaliatory tariffs if the levies go ahead, and the EU Commission has said it has a “strong plan” for the eventuality.

Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, said many Europeans felt “utterly disheartened”. Europe did not “start the confrontation. We do not necessarily want to retaliate, but if necessary we have a strong plan to retaliate and we will use it.”

The impact could be significant. Some European companies – think German car manufacturers, French wine and spirits makers – rely on US sales for up to 20% of their turnover, and some capitals are seeking to protect their national interests.

Lisa O’Carroll has a clear and handy guide to what we might expect here, and the Guardian’s deputy US business editor Calum Jones has a first-rate analysis of what the US president may be up to (assuming he knows) and how far he may go here.

Buckle up, and until next week.

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