Who is Marine Le Pen? French Far-right Leader, Two-Time Presidential Runner-Up Gets Five-Year Election Ban

Last Updated:March 31, 2025, 16:54 IST

Marine Le Pen's presidential hopes for 2027 were shattered as a French court sentenced her to four years in prison and banned her from office for five years

Le Pen took over as head of the then- Front (FN) in 2011. (Photo: AFP)

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s hopes for securing the French presidency in 2027 met with a disastrous fate on Monday with a French court sentencing her to four years in prison and banning her from running for office for five years.  

The ruling is likely to derail the far-right leader’s career and infuriate her millions of supporters especially at a time when her party’s electoral support was growing. 

Le Pen and 24 other officials from the Rally were accused of having used money intended for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. Le Pen and her co-defendants denied wrongdoing.

Who is Le Pen?

Le Pen, 56, took over as head of the then- Front (FN) in 2011 but rapidly took steps towards making the party an electoral force. She transformed the image of her party, shaking off the controversial legacy of its co-founder and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died earlier this year and who was often accused of making racist and anti-Semitic comments.

Within a year of taking over reins of her party, Le Pen, 56, came third in the 2012 presidential polls. She was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections. She has over the last year displayed the influence she wields in France after a long campaign to make her party an electable force,

Later, she renamed her party as the Rally and embarked on a policy known as “dediabolisation" (de-demonisation) with the stated aim of making it acceptable to a wider range of voters. The work bore fruit in the snap legislative polls last summer, with the RN emerging as the largest single party in the Assembly, although without the outright majority it had targeted. That gave Le Pen unprecedented power over French politics, which she used by backing a no-confidence vote that toppled the government of prime minister Michel Barnier later in the year.

(with inputs from AFP)

Paris, France

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