PARIS — Marine Le Pen, France’s far-right leader for two decades, intends to make her fourth presidential run even after an appellate panel ordered her to wear an electronic-monitoring device when it upheld her conviction for misusing public funds.

The head of the populist National Rally, which leads in opinion polls, will launch her 2027 campaign and lodge an appeal to France’s top court, she said. The maneuver will delay the sentence and enable her to travel unencumbered by the electronic bracelet, she added.

“Tonight, I am a candidate,” Le Pen said Tuesday on TF1 television news. “I won’t change my mind,” she added, hours after being cleared to enter the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen was initially convicted in March 2025 by lower-court judges who imposed an election ban lasting five years and a two-year jail term. The appeal judges shortened the ban, yet upheld the conviction for embezzling EU funds.

Le Pen is alleged to have misused about €474,000 ($541,810) between 2009 and 2016, when she was a member of the European Parliament, to hire aides. She was also accused of encouraging other lawmakers from her party to divert millions more euros in order to lower the National Rally’s financial burden.

Her decision to run clarifies the political landscape and effectively kicks off the presidential campaign. Her determination reflects her success over two decades of leading a party from the fringe of polite society into a mainstream political force. Marine took over the party in 2011 from her father Jean-Marie, who founded it as a nationalist, anti-immigration, antisemitic movement. She immediately began trying to improve the party’s image, changing its name and later ejecting her father.

She ran for president three times and made it to the runoff twice, improving her score each time. In recent years, Le Pen handed over day-to-day management to 30-year-old Jordan Bardella. Meantime, she dropped some radical ideas like exiting the euro and pulling France out of the EU; abandoning a plan to scrap dual citizenship — a calling card of the far right — and stopped opposing same-sex marriage. She also said moderate Islam is compatible with French values.

Yet she also maintained core elements of her party’s platform — hostility to immigration and a “national priority” doctrine that would see French citizens prioritized over foreign-born citizens in accessing various state benefits.

Seeking to succeed Macron, who defeated her in 2017 and 2022 and is legally barred from a third consecutive term, Le Pen is running under conditions that are more favorable than ever. Her party is the most popular in France. It is the largest and most powerful in the National Assembly. And its finances are improving thanks to repeated electoral victories.

If she wins next year — with the first round April 18 and the runoff May 2 — Le Pen said on TF1 she’d name Bardella prime minister.

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With assistance from Gaspard Sebag.

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