Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me as a Zanemunshank and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about Marine Le Pen. A French court saw some interesting developments yesterday,

a court that hears the appeal by Marine Le Pen against her conviction in a fraud case last year. And what happened yesterday is that

the prosecutors, while upholding the sentence or while calling for the sentence to be upheld,

have dropped the provisional ban on her for running from office.

Now, that is the big one, because it is the provisional ban

that would stop Marine Le Pen from running for the 2027 presidency contest next year.

So if the court were to follow this, prosecutors' demands, she can run. So in our

discussion today, we would like to first talk about exactly what happened, because this is a complicated

story, and it's easy to lose threat of the, it involves a lot of technical details of the

French legal system. And we also want to talk about the differences between a Le Pen presidency

and a Badalla presidency, because these are, you know, they're both members of the same party,

but they're not, they would not lead to the same presidency. And the spect the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, of a Le Pen presidency has been kind of sort of swept aside in recent, in recent, because everybody assumed that she can't run. So I think, you know, it's back on the agenda now. So, Zuzana, tell us what happened, what happened yesterday and what, what, what, what, what you think is what you think is sort of how we should think about this.

That decision from the course that came in the verdict last year in the first instance was basically uphold by the prosecutors.

They recommend a five-year ban for Marie Le Pen to run for political office.

The first instance courts ruled that the ban has to be implemented immediately with immediate effect on the provisional basis.

Provisional means in that sense that it has to be confirmed by the appeals,

by the appeals courts further down. And since the appeals court that Marine Le Pen is now in,

is the second, so there's the first appeals court, she would still have another appeal to go to,

if this appeals court were to confirm the first instance

ruling, she would still be able to go appeal this decision in a higher court, which is the

Cour de Cassation. So the whole process is not finished until it's finished. And then at the final

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