The French far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, has been sentenced to four years imprisonment and barred from running for president in 2027 after being found guilty of a vast system of embezzlement of European parliament funds.
Le Pen was banned after from running for public office with immediate effect after being unable argued his way out of the allegations levelled against her inside the court.
The decision on Monday was a political earthquake for the former presidential candidate, who was the leader of the far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party, dashed her hope of mounting a fourth campaign to become president.
Before the verdict, the 56-year-old had said that any immediate ban on running for election would be like a “political death sentence” and that judges had “the power of life or death over our movement”.
Judges handed Le Pen a five-year ban on running for public office with the added provision that it will take immediate effect and will apply despite the fact that she is appealing against the verdict.
Le Pen, who left the court before the hearing had finished, was also sentenced to four years in prison with two years suspended and the other two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. She was handed a €100,000 (£84,000) fine. Neither the prison penalty nor fine will be applied until her appeals are exhausted.
There was no immediate comment from Le Pen on the ruling. Her right-hand man, RN president Jordan Bardella, said: “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: It was French democracy that was killed”.
“It’s a blow to democracy,” Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, told reporters outside her party’s Paris headquarters. Laurent Jacobelli, a RN lawmaker and party spokesman, said Le Pen was in a “fighting mood”.
Le Pen and 24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.
The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case.
Le Pen will be able to retain her current post as member of the French parliament for Pas-de-Calais, but will not be able to stand again in a future parliamentary election for the duration of her ban on running for office.
