World
Fact check: Has Marine Le Pen’s appeal been denied?
Misleading posts circulating on X claim that an appeal lodged by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen against a conviction barring her from running in the 2027 presidential election has been rejected.
In March, Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis sentenced Le Pen to a five-year ban on holding public office, effective immediately, after finding she was “at the heart” of a scheme to embezzle European parliamentary funds.
The Paris Criminal Court also handed down a four-year prison sentence — two years suspended and two to be served with an electronic bracelet — along with a €100,000 fine. Le Pen has described the verdict as a “political witch-hunt” and declared she would exhaust all legal avenues to overturn it.
One widely shared post, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, claims that her appeal has already been denied, that the “French people are outraged”, and that the “EU is behind” the rejection.
But where does Le Pen actually stand, and do any of the post’s claims hold weight?
Has Le Pen’s appeal been rejected?
Essentially, to try and overturn her presidential ban as quickly as possible, Le Pen launched two separate challenges along French administrative and criminal paths.
On 15 October, the Council of State — France’s highest administrative court — rejected a legal challenge made by Le Pen against the country’s electoral rules.
It’s this administrative challenge that the post is likely referring to. As it happened weeks ago, it’s not breaking news, and it’s also separate from the appeal against her criminal conviction, which hasn’t been heard yet.
The administrative challenge concerned Le Pen’s removal from the electoral list in the Pas-de-Calais department, where she is an MP.
“Since she’s hit a wall in the criminal courts, Le Pen tried a side route: taking her case to the administrative courts,” Camille Aynès, constitutional law expert at the University of Paris Nanterre, told The Cube.
“Why go that way? Not really to win back her council seat. The real goal was strategic — to create a case that would allow her to raise a ‘priority question of constitutionality’ (QPC),” she said. “That’s a special French mechanism allowing someone in a lawsuit to ask whether the law applied in their case violates the Constitution.”
Ultimately, the Council of State refused to pass her challenge along. The criminal provisions that Le Pen contested, according to the court, were either non-existent or unrelated.
“The criminal provisions she was challenging weren’t even applicable in this administrative dispute,” Aynès told The Cube. “In other words, this wasn’t a backdoor appeal of her criminal conviction.”
The main impact of the Council of State court’s rejection is that Le Pen lost an opportunity to have the issue reviewed quickly, instead of waiting months for her appeal trial.
It’s an issue that she will have wanted to resolve quickly amid the political unrest in France — if President Emmanuel Macron called snap presidential elections, they could take place before Le Pen’s criminal appeal ruling, leaving her unable to run, whatever the subsequent result is.
Appeals yet to come
Despite claims made by online users that her appeal has been denied, Le Pen is launching a separate and larger appeal against her criminal conviction — the outcome of which is far from decided. A trial has been scheduled from 13 January until 12 February next year.
A verdict in this trial is expected before the summer, which would still give Le Pen time to stand in the 2027 presidential election, provided her sentence is overturned or reduced.
“The Council of State still has to rule on another QPC Le Pen filed over her removal as a regional councillor — but experts expect the outcome to be the same: no referral to the Constitutional Council,” Aynès told The Cube.
In July, Le Pen also sought an interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights — a Strasbourg-based court which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights — to quash the immediate application of her five-year ban. Her request was denied.
“At this point, only the criminal appeal can change things,” Aynès said. “If her verdict is upheld, she can then turn to the Court of Cassation [France’s supreme court for civil and criminal cases].”
Is the European Union to blame and how popular is Le Pen?
As for the claims that the “EU is behind” Le Pen’s ban, they’re also wrong: the case and the conviction are entirely under the French judiciary.
The details in the case date back to when Le Pen was an MEP. Prosecutors say that, between 2004 and 2016, she and several of her party members diverted funds meant to pay for parliamentary assistants to finance party activities in France.
According to Aynès, the wrongdoing only stopped because the European Parliament blew the whistle.
“That’s the only sense in which the EU can be said to have been ‘involved’ — it alerted prosecutors,” she said.
Similar narratives conflating the European Union’s role in national courts were repeated on social media after Romanian presidential candidate Călin Georgescu was banned from running in the country’s presidential election by the constitutional court.
Despite her legal woes, Le Pen and the National Rally (RN) party remain popular, so that part of the X post is true. At the time of her conviction, an Ifop Opinion poll placed her at 37%. More recent polling puts her and RN president Jordan Bardella between 33 and 37%, ahead of their political rivals.
Other claims that Bardella will run for her party as a presidential candidate are also unconfirmed, despite the 30-year-old having Le Pen’s vocal backing. RN did not respond to The Cube’s request for comment on the matter as of the time of publishing.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
World
Iranian protesters rename Tehran street after Trump, plead ‘don’t let them kill us’ amid crackdown
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Iranian protesters intensified nationwide demonstrations over the past 24 hours, directly appealing to President Donald Trump while chanting anti-regime slogans. Footage published Wednesday showed a protester in Tehran symbolically renaming a street after Trump, while other videos captured handwritten appeals reading, “Don’t let them kill us,” Iran International reported.
Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, posted the video on X stating, “Since Trump’s comments about the Iran protests, I’ve seen numbers videos of Iranian protesters either thanking him or, in this case, renaming streets after the US president.”
The appeals came as demonstrators faced a widening security crackdown, including the deployment of armed units and tear gas near major civilian sites in Tehran.
TRUMP SIGNS ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN’ HAT ALONGSIDE LINDSEY GRAHAM
Exiled Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi said the current unrest represents a historic opportunity to end Iran’s Islamic Republic.
“In all these years, I’ve never seen an opportunity as we see today in Iran,” Pahlavi said in an interview aired Tuesday on “Hannity.”
“Iranian people are more than ever committed to bringing an end to this regime, as the world has witnessed in the last few days, the level of demonstrations is unprecedented in Iran,” he said.
Pahlavi said protests have spread to more than 100 cities and emphasized the role of Iran’s traditional merchant class, describing developments inside the country’s bazaars as a turning point. “We are beginning to see more and more defections,” Pahlavi said, adding that “Either way, the regime is crumbling and is very close to collapsing.”
IRAN ON THE BRINK AS PROTESTERS MOVE TO TAKE TWO CITIES, APPEAL TO TRUMP
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., posted a photo of himself posing with President Donald Trump, who is holding a signed “Make Iran Great Again” hat. (Lindsey Graham / X)
Over the past 24 hours, Iran International reported continued protests and strikes across the country, including in Tehran, Tabriz, Qazvin, Kermanshah, Kerman, Shiraz, Falavarjan and Bandar Abbas. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar remained a focal point of unrest, with large crowds chanting against Iran’s leadership as authorities responded with tear gas and armed deployments.
Security operations expanded into sensitive civilian locations. Videos published by Iran International showed tear gas used near or inside Tehran’s Sina Hospital and the Plasco Shopping Center.
Protesters hold signs during a demonstration in Iran amid ongoing unrest, according to images released by the Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran. (NCRI )
Casualty and arrest figures continued to rise. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, cited by Iran International on Wednesday, reported at least 36 people killed since protests began, including 34 protesters and two members of Iran’s security forces, with more than 2,000 arrests nationwide. Iranian authorities have not released updated official figures.
New footage from the past day showed demonstrators lighting fires in the streets of Shiraz and chanting “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In Qazvin, protesters were heard chanting, “Law enforcement, return to the side of the nation.”
Iranian protesters try to take control of two cities in western Iran as nationwide unrest continues, with demonstrators chanting ‘Death to Khamenei’ in the streets. (Getty)
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Workers also joined the unrest, with strikes reported at the South Pars gas refinery and widespread shop closures at major markets in Tehran and Tabriz.
For the past year, staying in Donald Trump’s good graces has become a top priority for European leaders, who have gone the extra mile to appease the mercurial US president, rein in his most radical impulses and keep him firmly engaged in what is their be-all and end-all: Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Though Europe is by far the largest donor to Kyiv, nobody on the continent is under the illusion that the invasion can be resisted without US-made weapons and come to an eventual end without Washington at the negotiating table.
In practice, the strategic calculus has translated into painful sacrifices, most notably the punitive tariffs that Trump forced Europeans to endure.
“It’s not only about the trade. It’s about security. It is about Ukraine. It is about current geopolitical volatility,” Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commissioner for Trade, said in June as he defended the trade deal that imposed a sweeping 15% tariff on EU goods.
The same thinking is now being replicated in the saga over Greenland’s future.
As the White House ramps up its threats to seize the vast semi-autonomous island, including, if necessary, by military force, Europeans are walking an impossibly thin line between their moral imperative to defend Denmark’s territorial integrity and their deep-rooted fear of risking Trump’s wrath.
The precarity of the situation was laid bare at this week’s meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing” in Paris, which French President Emmanuel Macron convened to advance the work on security guarantees for Ukraine.
The high-profile gathering was notable because of the first-ever in-person participation of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the chief negotiators appointed by Trump.
At the end of the meeting, Macron hailed the “operational convergence” achieved between Europe and the US regarding peace in Ukraine. By his side, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was equally sanguine, speaking of “excellent progress”.
But it did not take long for the elephant in the room to make an appearance.
Hard pivot
The first journalist who took the floor asked Macron whether Europe could “still trust” America in light of the threats against Greenland. In response, the French president quickly highlighted the US’s participation in the security guarantees.
“I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of that commitment,” Macron said. “As a signatory of the UN charter and a member of NATO, the United States is here as an ally of Europe, and it is, as such, that it has worked alongside us in recent weeks.”
Starmer was also put on the spot when a reporter asked him about the value of drafting security guarantees for a country at war “on the very day” that Washington was openly talking about seizing land from a political ally.
Like Macron, Starmer chose to look at the bright side of things.
“The relationship between the UK and the US is one of our closest relationships, particularly on issues of defence, security and intelligence,” the British premier said. “And we work with the US 24/7 on those issues.”
Starmer briefly referred to a statement published earlier on Tuesday by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK and Denmark in defence of Greenland.
The statement obliquely reminded the US to uphold “the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders” enshrined in the UN Charter – precisely the same tenets that Moscow is violating at large in Ukraine.
The text did not contain any explicit condemnation of the goal to forcefully annex Greenland and did not spell out any potential European retaliation.
“Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” its closing paragraph read.
Conspicuous silence
The lack of censure was reminiscent of the European response to the US operation that just a few days earlier removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela.
Besides Spain, which broke ranks to denounce the intervention as a blatant breach of international law, Europeans were conspicuously silent on legal matters. Rather than condemn, they focused on Venezuela’s democratic transition.
Privately, officials and diplomats concede that picking up a fight with Trump over Maduro’s removal, a hostile dictator, would have been counterproductive and irresponsible in the midst of the work to advance security guarantees for Ukraine.
The walking-on-eggs approach, however, is doomed to fail when it comes to Greenland, a territory that belongs to a member of both the EU and NATO.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has warned that the entire security architecture forged at the end of World War II, which allies have repeatedly invoked to stand up to the Kremlin’s neo-imperialism, would collapse overnight in the event of an annexation. The worry is that trying to stay in Trump’s good graces at all costs might come at an unthinkable price.
“Europeans are clearly in a ‘double-bind’: Since they are in desperate need of US support in Ukraine, their responses to US actions – whether on Venezuela or Trump threatening Denmark to annex Greenland – are weak or even muted,” said Markus Ziener, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
“Europeans are afraid that criticising Trump could provide a pretext for the US president to conclude a peace deal at Ukraine’s and Europe’s expense. Is this creating a credibility gap on the part of the EU? Of course. But confronted with a purely transactional US president, there seems to be no other way.”
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