The ankle tag and the ballot box

Someone tried to kill Marine Le Pen when she was eight. It is believed it was far-left extremists who set off a five kilogram bomb that ripped through the Paris home of Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1976. Miraculously, neither the leader of the National Front, his wife or his three young daughters were killed.

 When she published her autobiography in 2006, Marine Le Pen wrote of that night: “I became aware of this terrible and incomprehensible fact: my father is not treated the same as everyone else; we are not treated the same as everyone else. This was to become a major factor in my own personal development.”

Twenty years later Le Pen still believes she is treated differently. She made that point in a television interview on Tuesday evening when discussing her unsuccessful attempt to overturn a conviction for misusing E.U funds. 

Why, she wondered, was she was convicted when two other political heavyweights — the centrist Francois Bayrou and the hard-left Jean-Luc Melenchon — were cleared of similar accusations.

She’s not alone in asking that question. France’s Private Eye, Le Canard enchaîné, was astonished earlier this year when judges decided to close an eight-year investigation into allegations that Melenchon also misused EU funds. “A minor miracle,” they called it.

 There was no such miracle for Le Pen on Tuesday. The court upheld the original verdict, declaring that she was guilty of helping to embezzle €2.9m (£2.5m) of EU funds between 2004 and 2016. It wasn’t for personal enrichment but to swell the coffers of her party’s funds. Ever since the National Front [Marine Le Pen rebranded the party the National Rally in 2018] was founded in 1972 it has struggled to raise funds. In 2014 they took out a 9 million euro loan at the First Czech Russian Bank to fund its 2017 presidential and parliamentary campaign, a move that led to allegations of collusion with Vladimir Putin.

 Le Pen denied the accusations, saying she had been forced to turn to a Russian bank for money because she was persona non grata to French ones. Even in 2026 — despite the fact the National Rally is the single biggest party with 122 MPs and has the support of nearly eleven million voters — French banks refuse to take her calls. The party’s treasurer, Kévin Pfeffer, says they are victims of “political discrimination”.

 Although Le Pen didn’t win her appeal she did receive a reduction in her sentence; initially disqualified from political life for five years, this was reduced to 45 months, 30 of which were suspended. As she has already served 15 months from the verdict in March last year to Tuesday’s appeal, she is free to stand as a candidate in next April’s presidential election.

 That was the good news for Le Pen; the bad news is that she will have to wear an electronic ankle tag for a year. Before the appeal she had told an interviewer it would “not be possible” to hit the campaign trail wearing a tag because it would curtail her freedom. Political commentators in France described the court’s ruling as “clever”. Le Pen is guilty of embezzlement but free to run in the election; so no one can accuse the judiciary of interfering in the democratic process. Francois Ruffin, a popular left-wing MP, said the judges “have put the ball back in her court”. In other words: surely a convicted felon wouldn’t dare run for the presidency, particularly weighed down by an electronic ankle tag.

On Tuesday evening Le Pen announced that she will run for the presidency. She is appealing her appeal, and is confident of winning, just as she is confident of winning the presidential election. Le Pen believes it is her destiny, and she is convinced she retains the support of her eleven million voters.

On Wednesday morning she took her first official step on the 2027 campaign trail, visiting the town of  La Flèche  in the west of France, one of several to fall to the National Rally in March’s local elections. She chose La Flèche for a reason: it was the most surprising victory for her party because the west of France has hitherto been impregnable to the National Rally. That is starting to change, just as the appeal of the National Rally now stretches beyond its traditional core vote of middle-aged blue-collar workers. More and more elderly people are turning to the party, as are the bourgeois.

 In part this is because of the desperate state of France after nine years of Emmanuel Macron. A poll last week revealed that 78% of the French consider his two terms of presidency a failure. Macron promised to reinvigorate the Republic but he has driven it to rack and ruin. The economy is stagnating, unemployment is rising, public debt has soared to unprecedented levels (€3.5361 trillion at the last count) and insecurity and immigration are also sky high. On Wednesday the Senate Finance Committee released a report in which it disclosed that asylum seekers cost France €2b in 2025. For a country that is teetering towards bankruptcy that is a damning statistic.

 The other reason for the growing appeal of the National Rally, despite their legal difficulties, is Le Pen’s right-hand man, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella.

He is the ying to her yang. He is more economically liberal than the Statist Le Pen and more socially conservative. He has an admirer in the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and many commentators have compared Bardella to another conservative president, Jacques Chirac, who led the Republic from 1995 to 2007.

 Crucially, Bardella doesn’t come with the Le Pen family baggage. He grew up on a housing estate in the north of Paris, the son of Italian immigrants, and yet despite this he is more attractive to bourgeois voters than the middle-class Le Pen. He is currently dating royalty, Princess Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Sicile, another fact likely to increase his appeal to the urban well-to-do — a crucial demographic for the National Rally if they are to win the presidency and also secure enough votes in the parliamentary elections to secure an absolute majority in the 577-seat Assembly.

Some have suggested that Bardella might be secretly disappointed that Le Pen will contest the presidency. Unlikely. They are a double act and he has his eye on the Premiership not the Presidency.

Visiting La Flèche on Wednesday Bardella expressed his “delight” at Le Pen’s decision to run because it means they can “continue to work hand in hand, as always.”

Not everyone was so delighted. An angry crowd of left-wing demonstrators banged saucepans and hurled abuse at the pair. “No criminals in government!” they chanted. Bardella and Le Pen were forced to cut short their walkabout and retreat to the town hall. There’s rarely a peaceful day if you’re a Le Pen.