French court clears a path for Le Pen to run for office with ankle monitor but upholds conviction

By Pierre P Bairin, Lauren Kent, Melissa Bell, Joseph Ataman, CNN

(CNN) — A French appeals court has opened the door for far-right leader Marine Le Pen to stand in next year’s presidential election, although she would likely be confined to her home with an ankle monitor after the court upheld her conviction for misusing EU funds.

The court ruled that Le Pen must serve a three-year jail term; however, it said two of those years were suspended and it ordered her to serve one year at home with an electronic monitoring tag.

The appeals court also effectively reduced the amount of time she is barred from running for office to just 15 months – technically a 45-month ban with 30 months suspended – and gave her a €100,000 ($114,000) fine.

The ruling means that she could still run for office in France’s 2027 presidential election while wearing an electronic ankle monitor – though that would make campaigning logistically difficult and likely create political issues for her National Rally party. The first round of voting will be held in April and a second round in May.

Le Pen had previously ruled out standing in the election if she had to wear an ankle tag.

“When you are a presidential candidate, you need to be completely free to move about, and that is not the case if you are wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet,” she told French news channel LCI last week. Le Pen is, however, eligible to ask the court for a sentence reduction in January 2027.

The 2027 race was already shaping up to be one of the most uncertain and consequential in recent French history, even before the appeals process froze, for the past 18 months, the question of whether the woman widely considered a favorite would be able to run at all.

Le Pen was originally barred from public office on March 31, 2025, when a Paris court found her and 11 other National Rally members guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds to pay the party’s staff in France. The initial ban on her running for public office was for five years and, controversially, took effect immediately before any appeal could be heard.

Speaking on French television on the evening of her conviction last year, Le Pen denounced the verdict as a “political” decision designed to keep her out of the 2027 race, calling it a “fateful day for our democracy.”

That initial ruling also triggered a furious response from her nationalist allies at home and abroad, feeding an anti-establishment narrative of an elite conspiring to shut them out. Then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán posted “Je suis Marine.” Elon Musk and the Kremlin rallied to her defense. US President Donald Trump also weighed in, calling it a “Witch Hunt.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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