Le Pen, along with her party — the National Rally — and 24 other individuals are on trial for having allegedly embezzled funds from the European Parliament to pay party employees. All those accused have denied the charges.
Prosecutors last week requested that Le Pen be sentenced to five years in prison — three years of which would be suspended — fined €300,000 and barred from running for public office for five years. The last punishment would upend her plans to run for the French presidency a fourth time during the next election, which is scheduled for 2027. Prosecutors urged the presiding judge to enforce the sentence immediately, which would bar Le Pen from running for office during any appeal process.
Under French law, punishments are usually suspended while a case is appealed. However, there have been other cases this year in which bans on political officials running for public office were applied immediately.
Le Pen’s defense in the court of public opinion has echoes of United States President-elect Donald Trump’s strategy of declaring his legal troubles as a politically motivated “witch hunt.” She argued that the prosecutors’ recommendation in her case was a “political act” because prosecutors in France are “not independent.”
Prosecutors are placed under the authority of the justice minister, but the justice minister is, by law, only allowed to give prosecutors broad instructions on criminal justice policy and is not allowed to weigh in on an individual case.
During the interview, she argued that being declared ineligible to run for public office would cause irreversible damage to her reputation, even if she ultimately won an appeal later.
