The key point to understand about the harsh sentence handed to Marine Le Pen yesterday — four years in prison, with two years suspended, an £85,000 fine, and, most significantly, a five-year ban from politics despite her appeal — is that she and her 24 National Rally (RN) colleagues in the dock were found guilty on all charges.

Like most political parties in France, where donations are limited to a measly €7,500 annually (capped at €15,000 for a household, a sum unchanged since 1988), the RN is perennially underfunded. Scrabbling for resources, the party thought it could get away with hiring Rally aides with European Parliament funds earmarked for MEP parliamentary assistants. The aides were never sent to Brussels or Strasbourg, instead working on domestic business at Rally headquarters while receiving EP salaries.

As part of their defence, RN officials argued — with some cause — that similar practices have been widespread across French politics. François Bayrou, the current prime minister, was also accused of misusing European Parliament funds for his centrist party, though his case involved Brussels-based assistants taking on additional tasks in Paris rather than being entirely absent from their official roles. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-Left France Insoumise, has faced similar allegations, though his case has yet to be tried.

While others may have blurred the lines, investigators found the RN’s misuse to be particularly blatant, with emails from aides — including one from Marine Le Pen’s own sister — explicitly requesting permission to visit Brussels or Strasbourg for the first time, despite being listed as parliamentary assistants for months.

There is a storied history of French politicians ignoring Brussels practice at their peril. This includes former PM Edith Cresson, appointed by President Mitterrand as a European Commissioner in 1995. She picked her dentist and another friend as “special aides”, with the dentist receiving a salary for two years at the European Commission.

But these are different times. Le Pen, a barrister herself, knew perfectly well that her judges were unlikely to feel lenient towards her and her ring-fenced party. For months, she’d been stridently accusing them of putting the fix in. When asked in interviews how she planned to respond to any verdict, she said she’d decide on it when the moment came, as if yesterday’s probable verdict was an incongruity.

“It’s not the first time she has indulged in magical thinking,” a former Rally candidate in the general election says. “She lost presidential debates like this.” But this candidate also noted that the judges might have “served her well”. “She becomes the casualty of a political fix, and the 2027 candidate will be her ‘avenger’,” they said. “The 29-year-old party president, Jordan Bardella, who’s young, charismatic, and can win.”

Asked about the pending court case months ago, Bardella himself vowed that if he won the presidency, he’d immediately pick Marine as his PM (which he legally can do). There’s a whiff of the Putin-Medvedev setup in this, but even though their relations are unusually good, two years is a long time in politics, and Bardella may not feel bound then by a promise made in earlier times.

In the meantime, the plan is to play the victim card to the hilt, ably assisted by allies abroad. (“Je suis Marine,” tweeted Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, while Vladimir Putin lectured that “the conviction of Marine Le Pen has violated democratic norms.”) It’s unclear whether Le Pen’s natural resilience will help her claw back a political career that looks near its natural end. A recent Charlie Hebdo cartoon showed a grinning Bardella pushing Le Pen’s wheelchair into a care home, with a caption “Pensioned at 56”.

Her last hope is a formal question put by France’s Council of State (the country’s top administrative court) to the Constitutional Council three months ago, following a similar verdict for a French MP from overseas. This procedure is known as a QPC (Question prioritaire de constitutionnalité), referring to an old law prohibiting “all attempts to curtail voters’ freedom to choose”. The Constitutional Council — now headed by Richard Ferrand, an old political friend of Emmanuel Macron’s — is meant to answer it by 3 April. It’s a very long shot but, either way, Le Pen’s political future may well be drawing to a close.

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Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based journalist and political commentator.

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