Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, has tried and failed three times to become president. Now, even as her popularity rises, she may be barred from taking part in an election to lead France if she is found guilty of embezzlement on Monday.
Such a verdict, far from certain, has been equated by Ms. Le Pen with a “political death” sentence and a “very violent attack on the will of the people.” It would ignite a major political storm at a time when the French Fifth Republic has appeared increasingly dysfunctional.
On the one hand stands the principle, as Nicolas Barret, one of the prosecutors, put it in closing arguments last year, that “We are not here in a political arena but a legal one, and the law applies to all.”
On the other hand lies the fear, expressed by some leading politicians, that a ban would undermine French democracy by feeding a suspicion that it is skewed against the growing forces of the hard right.
“Madame Le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere,” Gérald Darmanin, a former center-right interior minister, wrote on X in November. He is now the justice minister.
Ms. Le Pen, 56, has steered her anti-immigrant party from its antisemitic roots toward the mainstream. The party, whose name she changed from the National Front to the National Rally, is now the largest single party in the National Assembly with 123 seats.
Prosecutors have accused Ms. Le Pen and other members of the National Rally of embezzling some $4.8 million in European Union funds, essentially through no-show jobs at the European Parliament for lawmaker “assistants,” who were rarely there and worked as party staff.
Ms. Le Pen has denied the charges.
Her lawyers argue that the 2016 law under which she can be automatically banned from running for office was not in place at the time of the alleged scheme, and that the people involved were political aides, not European Parliament employees. Ms. Le Pen was a member of that assembly from 2004 to 2017.
The prosecution, led by Mr. Barret and Louise Neyton, has requested a five-year sentence for Ms. Le Pen, with three of those suspended; a 300,000-euro, or $325,000, fine; and a five-year ban with immediate effect on running for public office.
The objective of Ms. Le Pen and her co-defendants was “bluntly put, to turn the European Parliament into their cash cow,” Ms. Neyton said last year.
Even if Ms. Le Pen is convicted, the judges could waive any ban on running for office.
If imposed, however, the disqualification would exclude her from the 2027 presidential election in which President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, cannot run because he is term-limited. Ms. Le Pen ran in 2012, 2017 and 2022, steadily increasing her share of the vote to 41.45 percent.
An ineligibility verdict against Ms. Le Pen could be appealed. But the appeals process is slow, and it is far from clear that a new trial would take place before the 2027 election, or that the prosecution’s case would be overturned.
The National Rally has been reluctant to speculate on the consequences of a possible ban. Ms. Le Pen’s natural successor is Jordan Bardella, 29, a smooth-talking, unflappable protégé who Ms. Le Pen has said would be her prime minister if she were president.
When asked in a recent TV interview if he would run for president, absent Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Bardella punted: “She won’t be ineligible, so I don’t ask myself the question.”
With the forces of the anti-immigrant right rising in Europe, now encouraged by the Trump administration, Ms. Le Pen is widely regarded as a strong candidate, perhaps even the favorite, for the 2027 vote, if eligible.
Mr. Macron has not built a strong party, so his departure will create a vacuum that more than a half-dozen men — including Mr. Darmanin and former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal — are scrambling to fill with their presidential ambitions.
A chaotic snap parliamentary election last year, four prime ministers in the past 15 months, and a parliament paralyzed by its divisions have given the impression of a Fifth Republic hard pressed to provide coherent governance.
Disqualification of Ms. Le Pen would inevitably intensify criticism from leading American officials, including Vice President JD Vance, of a supposed campaign by European states to stifle the far right and so quash democracy in the name of saving it.
Hungarian and Italian democracies have delivered current leaders of, or descended from, the far right.
But of course Europe has a visceral memory of just how fragile democratic institutions are, and how authoritarian extreme-right movements destroyed them not so long ago, precipitating a blood bath.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and Ms. Le Pen’s father, repeatedly called the Holocaust a “detail” of history. She eventually expelled him from the party. Mr. Le Pen died in January.
If the verdict goes against Ms. Le Pen, the 2027 presidential election would be the first in almost 40 years that has not had a Le Pen on the ballot.
Aurélien Breeden contributed reporting.
