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.
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Hezbollah has begun unleashing “game changing” waves of “lethal” nighttime drones against Israel, a defense expert warns, with the attacks contributing to casualties, defense breaches and plunging parts of the border region into chaos, according to reports.
Escalating deployments by Hezbollah had also prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to convene an emergency security meeting on May 30 following a surprise Hezbollah strike, amid reports of “utter chaos” as Israeli forces scrambled to respond.
“These nighttime drones are the very small Category 1 and Category 2 drones,” defense expert and Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell told Fox News Digital.
“They are generally used by squads on the ground to go and conduct tactical lethal missions or surveillance missions right in theater immediately. What they are able to do is use thermal sensors to be able to fly at night and use heat signatures to spot IDF troops,” he said.
ISRAEL SAYS IT IS STRIKING HEZBOLLAH TARGETS IN LEBANON
Rockets are launched from Lebanon towards Israel amid escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from the Israeli side of the border. (Gil Eliyahu/Reuters)
“Hezbollah now has nighttime capabilities, which is game changing,” Chell added.
“What you will see is an escalation of the use of drones and the innovation of asymmetric warfare in that particular area by Hezbollah,” he warned.
Chell’s comments came amid reports of makeshift defenses with nets being deployed against the backdrop of a significant shift in the conflict.
Israeli soldiers have resorted to buying commercial fishing and soccer nets to entangle the incoming aerial threats, according to reports.
“This means that there is a whole other set of countermeasures that the IDF has to put in place, whether it is electronic jamming, net guns or the use of netting just to put in front of installations or in front of vehicles to try to stop the final impact of the drone if it is a strike drone,” Chell added.
HEZBOLLAH DISARMAMENT DEADLOCK RISKS CIVIL WAR, ANALYSTS SAY, AS US PREPARES FOR ISRAEL–LEBANON TALKS
Smoke rises following a projectile attack amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel near Shlomi in northern Israel on Oct. 19, 2024. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
“The IDF will have to change a lot of their tactics regarding their ability to move around and conduct operations at night. Now they will have to factor in the fact that Hezbollah has nighttime capabilities to at least do observation using thermal cameras, as well as strike capabilities.”
Netanyahu called a meeting with top officials following an intense Hezbollah rocket and drone blitz that caught the military off guard on Saturday.
According to a report by Channel 13, the Israeli army was surprised by the scale of the fire as well as Hezbollah’s decision to shift its operational policy in response to the expansion of Israel’s ground operations beyond the Litani River.
IDF SOLDIERS ACCUSE UN PEACEKEEPERS OF ENABLING HEZBOLLAH TERRORISTS AMID INCREASING CEASE-FIRE VIOLATIONS
Hezbollah terrorists holding rifles are shown in this image. A “terrorist network” funded and operated by Hezbollah and Iran was foiled in the United Arab Emirates, according to a report. (Fadel Itani/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Reports from the ground described “utter chaos” in parts of the north. While rockets were said to have hit the cities, Hezbollah simultaneously launched waves of drone strikes.
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has also touted the militant group’s drone capabilities, calling them an effective weapon against Israeli forces operating near and inside southern Lebanon.
Netanyahu has also described Hezbollah’s drone capabilities as a major threat given the difficulty in detecting them.
“Hezbollah have got a supply line or supply chain of some sort set up,” Chell added before stating that they are not “using stuff that is groundbreaking; this is very old technology and tactics that they are using.”
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“That said, somebody is making the equipment available to Hezbollah — whether it is coming via Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan or the black market, someone is getting enough product and feeding it into their supply chains,” Chell warned.
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At Frankfurt am Main’s central station, Deutsche Bahn also warns passengers on board the trains about pickpockets. Travellers leaving the station are confronted with the misery of drug addicts who congregate in Kaiserstrasse and the surrounding streets, whether they like it or not. Police are usually on the scene, but from the outside little seems to have changed in recent years.
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And the figures on violence at Germany’s railway stations are causing headaches for many officials. Since this weekend the federal police have stepped up their presence at stations in ten major German cities. Yet when it comes to crime at stations, Frankfurt does not sit at the top of the list.
The stations particularly affected by crime in 2025 were the central station in Leipzig, with 859 violent offences, the central station in Dortmund with 735 and the central station in Berlin with 654.
Most recently, the fatal attack on a conductor on a regional train in Rhineland-Palatinate last February caused widespread shock. It was followed by a debate about the scale of attacks on Deutsche Bahn staff.
Expert: “No railway station in Germany is a no-go area”
In total, according to police statistics, 27,800 violent offences were committed at railway stations last year. These included 980 recorded knife attacks and more than 2,200 registered sexual offences. Some 5,660 acts of violence were directed against federal police officers. According to the police, the suspected perpetrators were significantly more often non-Germans than Germans.
Criminologist Dirk Baier does describe stations as “hotspots of crime”. But in an interview with WELT the expert also explains that violence at stations is particularly visible precisely because the police presence there is higher and because it is reported on more frequently. “From my point of view there is no major station in Germany that is a no-go area.”
Indeed, directly opposite Frankfurt’s central station many people – including families and women – have no difficulty doing their shopping in the chemists and the supermarket.
Police officers at stations instead of at border controls
The deputy leader of the CDU group in the Bundestag, Günter Krings, wants to improve public safety at stations through technical measures such as more cameras, while at the same time relieving pressure on police officers. Discussions on this are currently taking place within the coalition parties.
The AfD describes Germany’s railway stations as “spaces of fear” and is calling for tougher sentences, more consistent deportations and an increased police presence.
However, the Greens’ domestic policy spokesman, Marcel Emmerich, believes that while video surveillance can be useful, it cannot replace officers on the ground. The government, he says, is deploying thousands of federal police officers for “expensive, pointless and unlawful border controls” instead of strengthening their presence at stations.
Weapons and alcohol bans at stations
As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, weapons bans now apply from Friday to Sunday at Munich’s central station and the Ostbahnhof in the Bavarian capital, as well as at the main stations in Nuremberg, Regensburg and Rosenheim. This means that knives and dangerous tools may not be carried there at weekends. According to SZ, officers can stop, question and search people even without a specific reason.
An alcohol ban has been in force at Cologne’s central station (Hbf) since April; it now also applies to the stations in Bonn, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund and Münster.
Deutsche Bahn has domiciliary rights at its stations and can therefore enforce its own rules there, such as an alcohol ban.
Violence at railway stations is by no means solely a German phenomenon, as the recent knife attack in Winterthur in Switzerland shows.
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