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National Rally leader Marine Le Pen poses prior to an interview on the evening news broadcast of French TV channel TF1, in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris, France, on March 31, 2025.
Can France’s Marine Le Pen run again?
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty by a French court on Monday for embezzling European Parliament funds. She was sentenced to four years (with two years suspended and the remainder under house arrest with electronic monitoring) and faces a five-year ban from running for public office.
Coup de grâce? Le Pen shared her anger with French voters. “Like you, I’m scandalized, indignant, but this indignation, this feeling of injustice, is an additional push to the fight that I fight for [the voters],” she said on French television Monday night.
Le Pen’s lawyer said she will appeal the decision, which will likely lead to a retrial in 2026 — months before the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen can also petition the Constitutional Council to review her case and ultimately decide her eligibility. Last week, this court ruled that local politicians can be barred from office immediately if they are convicted of a crime — but this won’t apply to national figures like the National Rally’s longtime leader.
“Le Pen will now seek to make her appeal explicitly political, arguing before the Constitutional Council that she is too important a politician to ban and that doing so would be an affront to French democracy,” said Rahman. Even so, her route back to eligibility won’t be easy.
Next in line. If Le Pen is ultimately barred from running, National Rally President Jordan Bardella would be the most likely candidate to succeed her. The clean-shaven millennial, who grew up in the Paris suburbs, has tried to expand the party’s tent by courting younger voters and distancing the party from Le Pen’s father, the Holocaust-denying founder of National Rally.Workers of the Judiciary in Mexico City, Mexico, on October 15, 2024, protest outside the National Palace in the capital against judicial reform in Mexico. They reject the bill promoted by the former president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, which proposes the election by popular vote of judges, magistrates, and ministers of the Supreme Court starting in 2025.
Mexican Congress defangs the judiciary as majority of Supreme Court resigns
Eight out of Mexico’s 11 Supreme Court justices announced late Wednesday that they would resign their positions in opposition to a judicial overhaul that requires them to stand for election, while at the same time Congress passed new legislation that will prohibit legal challenges to constitutional changes. With the opposition in tatters and the courts castrated, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party has free rein to implement its far-reaching agenda, known as the Fourth Transformation.
Experts say the legislation means Mexico effectively has no checks on presidential and legislative power, given Morena’s coalition supermajority in Congress. The opposition PRI and PAN parties are deeply unpopular and tarnished by corruption, with slim chances of recovering popular support before the midterm elections in 2027. With a strong popular mandate to boot, Morena is on stable ground to pursue whatever projects it wants to prioritize, no matter how potentially disruptive.
Seven of the eight resigning justices will serve through August 2025, with their replacements set to be elected in June, while the eighth has reached retirement and will leave his seat on Nov. 30. The justices made clear their resignations are not meant to legitimize the judicial overhaul, but they stood to lose their pensions if they did not resign or declare their candidacy by Oct. 31.
What’s the next signpost? All eyes will be on the Supreme Court on Nov. 5 (the same day as the US election), when it is expected to discuss a draft ruling on the judicial overhaul that requires justices to stand for election. They may find portions of the overhaul unconstitutional, but with Wednesday’s legislation, that point is rendered moot.