Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we talk about Marine Le Pen. The verdict against her on Monday banned her from office for five years.

It was a provisional ruling but the ban is already in place. It has caused predictably a massive ruckus in France and also abroad.

It's a massive story. So we need to understand whether this is for real and discuss the broader

context. It's not the first time that the judiciary has banned a politician or has interfered

with politics. This may be part of a broader culture.

It has almost surely significant political consequences.

Susanna, tell us what's happening, what you think is going to happen.

So the ruling came on in the first instance after the process opened in 2014.

So this is about embezzlement of EU funds that were meant to be paying

assistance in the European Parliament. And the party, La Sassemblement National, and at that time,

that was also Marine Le Pen as an MEP, they used these funds to pay people in the party, so in the national context.

So it's important to frame this as a way because often the supporters of her say there was no

personal enrichment.

The funds involved were quite large.

It was $2.5 million, I think.

It was over a long period from 2006 until 2014. So this

is quite a long period. It suggests that there was basically a scheme and that's how the judge

actually saw it when they presented their ruling on Monday. There are two ways to think about it.

One is about the provisional ban. And I think

there you can find a bigger majority of people who have an issue with the provisional ban as such.

The idea of a provisional ban is that it is in place, even though the appeal process has not

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