Marine Le Pen announced on July 7, 2026, that she will run in France's 2027 presidential election, telling TF1 hours after a Paris appeals court ruled on her long-running conviction in the European Parliament fake jobs case Al Jazeera.

The appeals court reduced her ban on holding elected office to 45 months, with 30 of those suspended. The remaining 15 months are expected to be backdated to the original lower court verdict of March 2025, which would put the effective bar on candidacy behind her by the time of the 2027 vote Al Jazeera. The Paris appeals court also convicted her to one year of prison to be served under electronic bracelet, or house arrest, rather than incarceration Le Monde.

That tag condition had been the sticking point. Le Pen had said for months she would not run if forced to campaign wearing an electronic monitor — a stance she reiterated as recently as July 1, telling reporters she was not afraid of the court's decision but would not campaign tethered to a device Le Monde. On July 7 she said she would in fact campaign without the tag, citing her right to appeal further and noting the state is suspending enforcement of the ruling while that appeal proceeds Al Jazeera.

The underlying case concerns the Front National's use of European Parliament funds to pay parliamentary assistants who allegedly did party work rather than EU-related duties — the so-called assistants fictifs affair Le Monde. The original lower court sentence, handed down when Le Pen was 57, carried a five-year ban from public office and two years in prison, a penalty that would have removed her from the 2027 field entirely Al Jazeera.

The reduction on appeal changes the practical arithmetic of the Rassemblement National's succession question. Since the lower court verdict, RN president Jordan Bardella had been positioned as the likely standard-bearer if Le Pen's ban held. Le Pen herself has already sought to define the boundaries of any Bardella presidency: in a September 2025 interview on LCI's "Objectif 2027," she said she would not serve as his prime minister were he elected in 2027 TF1 Info. That remark, made before the appeal outcome was known, now reads differently — it foreclosed one path for herself while leaving open whether Bardella remains the party's fallback candidate now that she intends to run herself.

The legal mechanics matter here as much as the politics. French electoral law bars candidates under an executory ban from holding office (peine d'inéligibilité), but the effect of a sentence can be suspended pending further appeal — which is the provision Le Pen is now invoking to campaign unencumbered. Whether the cassation court, France's final appellate venue for such matters, ultimately upholds the reduced sentence or the suspension itself is a separate and still-open question. Le Pen's public position — that she can campaign now because enforcement is stayed — is a legal argument, not a final resolution of her eligibility.

The broader significance of this ruling extends beyond one candidacy. France's ineligibility statute, tightened in 2016 to make bans on public office quasi-automatic for corruption-related convictions, was designed partly to prevent politicians under a cloud from simply running out the electoral clock through appeals. Le Pen's case has become the highest-profile test of how that statute interacts with a multi-tier appeals process when the defendant is a leading presidential contender. Whatever the cassation court eventually decides, the sequencing — appeals ruling, immediate declaration of candidacy, contested tag enforcement — will likely shape how future cases involving sitting or aspiring officials are litigated and timed relative to election calendars.

For the RN, the immediate effect is clarity, however provisional. Le Pen re-enters the 2027 race as the party's presumptive lead figure rather than a sidelined founder-in-exile, and Bardella's position shifts back toward the number-two role he has occupied for most of the party's recent electoral cycles. Rival parties and the Elysée will now have to reckon with a Le Pen candidacy as the base case rather than a contingency, even as the legal proceedings around her sentence remain unresolved heading into the campaign.