Fifth column
A court has freed Marine Le Pen to seek the French presidency. A victory would let a founding member corrode the European Union from within.
A news cycle focused on the renewal of hostilities in the Middle East, the World Cup, the sharp fall in the value of tech stocks (particularly semiconductors), a change of prime minister in the United Kingdom and an unprecedented heatwave across most of western Europe meant that a decision taken by a Paris court on July 7 went largely unnoticed.
The decision, however, which cleared the way for French far-right politician Marine Le Pen to run for president next year could have seismic consequences for France, and for Europe as a whole.
Found guilty in March 2025 of misusing public funds, the Paris appeals court on July 7 upheld Le Pen’s conviction but reduced the five years she is barred from public office to 45 months, with 30 suspended, leaving her free to run for president in an election expected to take place in April or May next year. Le Pen confirmed that she would run later the same day. Le Pen, who has run for president on three previous occasions, came second to Emmanuel Macron in both 2017 and 2022. Macron, now in the final year of his second term, is unable to run for a third.
Le Pen, despite her conviction, has a healthy lead in all opinion polls, with solid support of around 35 per cent of the French electorate. That puts her well ahead (by around 15 percentage points) of Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister under Macron and her likely closest challenger.
Her earlier campaigns promised to pull France out of the euro and, at times, out of the European Union itself. Those pledges have gone. In a May interview with Le Point, Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old president of Le Pen’s National Rally party and her designated heir, set out the alternative: keep France inside the club and bend it from the inside. He wants a constitutional referendum to lift French law above EU rules on migration, and a rebate on France’s contribution to the Brussels budget. “When the Germans want to defend their interests, they succeed,” he told the magazine.
Ironically, perhaps, that worries Brussels more than any outright French exit would. Eric Maurice of the European Policy Centre, a think tank, reckons Bardella’s proposed rebate, worth around two billion euros, would test France’s commitment to the club, and that a referendum subordinating EU law to French statute would run flatly against EU treaties. A small net recipient that proves troublesome (such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary) can be outvoted and starved of funds in a way that France cannot. It is the bloc’s second-largest economy, a founding member, a net contributor and, with Germany, one of the two engines that have driven integration and expansion since 1957. A French president minded to obstruct could freeze decisions that require unanimity, such as tax harmonisation and enlargement.
Whether Le Pen would push harder than her protégé is the open question. Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think tank, judged in May that she remains the more instinctive sovereigntist of the two, shaped by a family and a career built in opposition to the European project. Bardella has talked of reforming the union. Le Pen has spent three decades opposing it.
On July 15, a week after the verdict, Bloomberg reported that Vanguard and Natixis were among the fund managers shunning French government debt, Le Pen’s candidacy having revived questions about the public finances. The extra yield investors demand to hold French ten-year bonds over German ones, the euro area’s cleanest gauge of political risk, has sat near 70 basis points since Macron’s snap parliamentary election of 2024, up from about 50 before it, even as the same premium for Italy and Spain has fallen towards 40. Analysts at MUFG wrote on July 10 that a Le Pen presidency backed by a National Rally majority would stoke fears of looser budgets and sharper friction with Brussels, and push that spread wider still. France’s accounts give them reason, with debt nearing 120 per cent of output and the deficit reaching 5.1 per cent in 2025. The Cour des Comptes, the state auditor, has warned that interest payments are smothering the budget. The European Central Bank could cap a rout through its Transmission Protection Instrument, though it has yet to deploy it.
A tide going out
Orbán, for years Le Pen’s most reliable ally in the EU, lost power in Hungary on April 12 after 16 years, beaten by Péter Magyar, a centre-right challenger who ran on dragging the country back to Europe’s mainstream. “Hungary has chosen Europe,” wrote Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, that night. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni (who it was feared might be a troublemaker in Brussels) has instead spent her time in office working with von der Leyen’s centre-right rather than trying to break it. Le Pen would reach the Élysée, if she gets there, with fewer allies in power across the union than when she last ran in 2022.
Édouard Philippe, who declared his candidacy in September 2024, remains the centrist likeliest to meet her in a run-off. France’s two rounds of voting have stopped her before: she reached the second round in 2017 and again in 2022, and lost both times as voters of left and right swung behind her opponent. That front républicain has weakened as the National Rally has shed its pariah image, but it has held, just about, at every parliamentary election since. And a Le Pen presidency without a National Rally majority in the National Assembly would face cohabitation with a rival prime minister; MUFG’s analysts reckon that make much of her programme, and her fight with Brussels, a non-starter.
Nevertheless, the prospect of an awkward, combative Le Pen presidency is real. The EU has just under a year to prepare. There are few signs yet that it has begun to do so.
