Le Pen's embezzlement conviction upheld, but French voters show little concern

In Montargis, a town of canals and pralines seventy-five miles south of Paris, Jean-Antoine sat with the morning news and felt vindicated. The retired decorator, seventy-six, who once painted the interiors of luxury fashion stores, had watched Marine Le Pen's embezzlement conviction survive an appeal court challenge this week. The judges had upheld the guilty verdict—she had orchestrated the siphoning of more than €2.8 million through a fake-jobs scheme between 2004 and 2016, funneling the money to her cash-strapped National Rally party. But they had also shortened the ban on her holding office, a restriction that had previously locked her out of the presidential race until the 2030s. Now, with that barrier lowered, she could run again. And Jean-Antoine, like many in this town, saw no reason to hold it against her. "Even the judges said she didn't personally profit from the money, it was for her party," he said. "All politicians in France have always been schemers, it's just a fact of life."

The conviction itself was extraordinary in its scope. The court found Le Pen guilty of playing a central role in a scheme of unprecedented scale and duration. The sentence included an electronic ankle tag and a year-long home curfew. Yet Le Pen had already vowed to appeal to France's highest court, a move that would effectively suspend her conviction while she campaigned for the presidential vote scheduled for April and May 2025. Snap polling showed her popularity remained high. She had lost to Emmanuel Macron twice before, in 2017 and 2022, but the political landscape had shifted. Montargis itself was a barometer of that shift. In local elections earlier in the year, the National Rally and its allies had more than tripled the number of town halls under their control. The town's new mayor, Côme Dunis, thirty-six years old, had been an active participant in the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019.

Jean-Antoine's own family history complicated his politics in ways he seemed not to dwell on. His father had fled Spain during its civil war in the 1930s and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation. "But now immigration has to stop," Jean-Antoine said. The contradiction hung in the air unexamined. An antiques dealer in his sixties, who declined to give his name, offered a different framing of the same sentiment. "People will still vote for Le Pen because there's massive pressure for change," he said. "Immigration, benefits, the healthcare system—none of that is working properly and people have had enough. Le Pen's legal case feels unfair—a leftwing politician wouldn't have been treated the way Le Pen was by the justice system." The conviction, in this reading, was not evidence of wrongdoing but proof of persecution.

Not everyone in Montargis saw it that way. Gisèle, eighty-four, a recently retired gymnastics coach and competition judge, acknowledged her support for Le Pen but worried the embezzlement conviction might actually damage her chances. "I think this could put a brake on her," she said. Christiane, a chiropodist, expressed disappointment that Le Pen's decision to run meant Jordan Bardella, the party's thirty-year-old president, would not be the candidate. Bardella had been broadening the National Rally's appeal to more affluent voters from the traditional right. "Bardella is young, he's close to the people, he had a chance," Christiane said. "I like Marine Le Pen, but is France really going to elect a president with a conviction?" A centrist pharmacist named Céline was more direct: "I don't think it's right to run for French president if you have been convicted."

But beneath the political calculations lay something darker. Selma, forty-eight, a mother of three whose Tunisian grandfather had been decorated for fighting for France in the Second World War, spoke of a different kind of cost. She feared Le Pen's growing prominence in the campaign was polarizing the country in ways that went beyond electoral strategy. "I'm worried about deep divisions in society," she said. "Racism is becoming more brazen. The other day I was verbally assaulted in a car park. A woman who wanted my parking spot humiliated me in a racist way, saying she was more French than I was." The town itself had experienced this volatility. In 2023, rioting had spread through Montargis after Paris police shot and killed Nahel Merzouk, a seventeen-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, when he failed to comply with an order to stop his car. Shops and businesses were damaged. The National Rally, originally founded in 1972 as the Front National by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine's father, had long been viewed by critics as a threat to democratic norms and as a promoter of racist, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim ideology. Marine Le Pen had spent fifteen years attempting to rebrand the party, changing its name while keeping its hardline anti-immigration stance intact. The strategy had worked in electoral terms. But the question of what it meant for France—whether a convicted candidate could legitimately seek the presidency, whether the party's rebranding had actually changed its nature or merely its presentation—remained unresolved as the campaign season approached.