{"id":962,"date":"2025-04-02T02:37:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T02:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/962\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T02:37:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T02:37:07","slug":"why-marine-le-pen-should-be-allowed-to-run-for-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/962\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Marine Le Pen should be allowed to run for president"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-component=\"paragraph\" class=\"css-1l5amll e1y9q0ei0\">BETWEEN 2004 and 2016, Marine Le Pen was at the heart of a scheme that diverted European Union funds to pay her party\u2019s political staff, falsely claiming that they were working as assistants to its deputies in the European Parliament. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/europe\/2025\/03\/31\/barring-marine-le-pen-is-a-political-thunderbolt-for-france\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Thus ruled<\/a> a Paris court on March 31st, sentencing Ms Le Pen and 23 other officials of her hard-right National Rally (RN) party to a mix of fines, prison terms and bans from campaigning. The decision has landed in French politics like a bomb, owing to one aspect of Ms Le Pen\u2019s sentence: she is barred for five years from running for office, with immediate effect. That would include the presidential election in 2027, in which she is the front-runner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BETWEEN 2004 and 2016, Marine Le Pen was at the heart of a scheme that diverted European Union&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[36,695,12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-france","9":"tag-leaders","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114266049303381440","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}