Paris —
Let the people decide. That was the defiant message of two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday, as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen announced, within hours of each other, their intention to defy their country’s norms in order to put the same pitch to the same jury, with both French and British mainstream politics now in the balance.
In France, Marine Le Pen took to the evening news to launch her defiant fourth run for the presidency, just hours after a court announced that legally she could.
In a sweltering courthouse in central Paris, journalists had crammed into overflow rooms to hear, just after lunchtime, a ruling on Le Pen’s appeal against the 2025 criminal conviction that found her, her far-right National Rally party and 11 of its most senior members guilty of embezzling millions of euros worth of European funds to pay the salaries of party-political workers in France.
On Tuesday, the ban on her standing for office was shortened but her conviction and sentence upheld, which meant Le Pen was still facing a year of home detention under an electronic tag, a condition she had previously sworn would make campaigning impossible.
