For more than a year, it seemed that France was moving on from Marine Le Pen, the veteran far-right leader and longtime challenger for the presidency. After she was convicted of embezzlement in March 2025 and barred from running for office, many assumed her protégé Jordan Bardella would run in her stead in next year’s presidential race.
On Wednesday, it was as if she had never been away. Less than a day after an appeals court upheld her conviction but lifted the ban, Ms. Le Pen began her presidential campaign in the small French town of La Flèche, 160 miles southwest of Paris, capping a stunning reversal that has returned her to the forefront of French politics.
The messy event, where she was met with both cheering supporters and angry protesters, perfectly captured the spirit of the divided country in the wake of her announcement.
“We are starting our presidential campaign,” Ms. Le Pen said to a clutch of journalists crowding around her at the town market. Supporters tried to move close, and protesters whistled and banged pots nearby.
“I am not going to spend the presidential campaign giving you legal analyses,” she said, referring to the court’s decision. “What I want now is for us to talk about politics, because the future of the French people is at stake,” she added, with Mr. Bardella by her side.
Ms. Le Pen’s return has stirred up France’s political landscape less than a year before an election next April for a successor to President Emmanuel Macron, who has reached his term limit. Her decision to run, even after the judges upheld her conviction, came as a surprise: Before the court’s decision, she had suggested she would not run if she was convicted and therefore not able to campaign freely.
Centrist and leftist candidates who had been preparing to run against the relatively inexperienced Mr. Bardella must now compete against a seasoned political leader. Ms. Le Pen is already riding high in the polls and could be closer than ever to the presidency on her fourth attempt. Yet with the court case still hanging over her — she said she would appeal the conviction again at France’s highest court — she faces questions about her integrity that might not have been directed at Mr. Bardella.
She joins many candidates already in the race, including Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, both centrist former prime ministers; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left former lawmaker and longtime presidential challenger; and Bruno Retailleau, a conservative former interior minister. Recent opinion surveys by the Ipsos and Ifop market-research firms and others show that Ms. Le Pen leads them all by at least 10 percentage points.
“It’s a big shift for the presidential race,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at Côte d’Azur University in Nice. “She is back, but with a Damocles sword over her head.”
By starting her campaign in the little-known town of La Flèche, Ms. Le Pen implicitly highlighted the appeal of her anti-immigrant party, the National Rally, to communities across rural France where residents feel left behind by the central government. The party recently captured the mayoralty in this isolated country town of 15,000, which has no train station and can be reached only by road.
The location also seemed calculated to point out Ms. Le Pen’s influence over the party, after she was briefly eclipsed by Mr. Bardella. Her sister Marie-Caroline Le Pen lost a legislative election here by a slim margin in 2024, and Marie-Caroline’s husband, Philippe Olivier, a senior party member, is a mentor to the town’s mayor.
Marie-Caroline Le Pen said in an interview, “Coming here on the ground, just the day after the verdict, to this town newly won in the municipal elections, is very symbolic.”
Ms. Le Pen was convicted of overseeing a scheme in which the National Rally illegally channeled several million euros from the European Union that were intended to subsidize salaries for the party’s employees at the European Parliament. Instead, the court said, the money paid those employees for work unrelated to E.U. business. She denied the accusations and was not accused of profiting personally.
To her rivals, Ms. Le Pen’s decision to return despite that conviction has already offered them a flaw to attack. Some pointed out that Ms. Le Pen started her political career by skewering corruption and built her party’s far-right platform on law and order.
“You shouldn’t believe a word Marine Le Pen says” Manuel Bompard, the national coordinator for the far-left party France Unbowed, said in a radio interview on Wednesday morning. “She says one thing and then does the exact opposite,” he added.
Jean-François Copé, the conservative mayor of Meaux, a small city east of Paris, called Ms. Le Pen a “intellectual and moral fraud.” Speaking on national television on Wednesday morning, he said she had “wiped her feet on 40 years of moral lectures that she had given to absolutely everyone about how the political class was dishonest and how she would embody ‘clean hands, head held high.’”
But her unexpected decision has also put her opponents in an awkward position. They must balance between defending the law and avoiding the perception that they want to rob voters of the chance to judge Ms. Le Pen at the ballot box. Mr. Philippe, the former prime minister, said on Wednesday, “I prefer to step up and defeat Ms. Le Pen at the ballot box rather than see her taken off the board by a court decision.”
As Ms. Le Pen appeals her latest conviction, her court sentence will be put on hold and she will campaign without being required to wear an electronic bracelet or report to the police station.
She has gambled that the court will not make a new ruling before next April, when the first round of voting is scheduled to take place, and that voters will see the charges as an attempt by an unelected judiciary to thwart the will of the people, or will admire her courage to run despite the conviction, if its upheld.
“Listen, it is up to the voters to judge,” Ms. Le Pen told the crowding cameras on Wednesday.
Ms. Le Pen chose the motif “For France, rebirth” as her campaign slogan, plastering the words across a website that she put up hours after the court decision. The site features a photo of her with her arms outstretched.
In La Flèche, her campaign kickoff was baptized by the sounds of protesters hollering, “Marine, in prison,” “Thief” and “Give the money back.”
“It would have been ridiculous to let her parade around and launch her campaign without expressing our disagreement,” said Adeline Cognard, 48, a health worker and city councilor who was among the protesters.
But many of Ms. Le Pen’s supporters seemed unfazed.
“So, she was convicted. She’s not the only one. You don’t think others have put money in their pocket?” said Farida Franville, 67, who was among the few who made it through the jostling crowd to exchange kisses on the cheek with Ms. Le Pen.
Around her, supporters tried to drown out the protesters by chanting, “Marine, president.”
Giulia Imbert contributed reporting from Paris.