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Near a roast chicken stand at a rural market, Jocelyn Dessigny was giving out leaflets bearing a photograph of the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and the words “Save democracy!”
“It is a political attack,” he said of Le Pen’s criminal conviction this week.
After a two-month trial in Paris, Le Pen was found guilty of organising a system of fake job contracts to embezzle more than €4m (£3m) of European parliament funds between 2004 and 2016. Judges placed an immediate ban on her taking part in elections for five years, sparking fury from Le Pen, who said they had effectively “excluded” her from the 2027 French presidential race.
“There’s a sense of stupefaction,” said Dessigny, 43, a former sales manager who is a member of parliament for Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party in the L’Aisne département in north-eastern France. The area, which has higher than average unemployment and poverty levels, is a Le Pen heartland that has contributed to some of the party’s highest electoral scores in recent years.
Dessigny now found himself hurriedly organising car-shares to Paris where, on Sunday, Le Pen will hold an open-air protest rally to challenge what she called a “tyranny of judges” who wanted to stop her running in a presidential race she said she could otherwise win.
Calling a protest rally in Paris is a departure for Le Pen, who for more than a decade has endeavoured to present her party as a mainstream operation that is able to govern, rather than a repository for angry protest votes, even as political opponents say its policy platform remains racist, xenophobic and anti-Islam.
Political commentators speculated that after the embezzlement verdict, Le Pen’s party might now revert to a more overtly populist approach. The rightwing head of the northern Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, warned that Sunday’srally could be a Donald Trump-style response to stoke supporters’ fury. He said it could be a “poor remake of the Capitol” – a reference to Donald Trump’s supporters storming Capitol Hill in January 2021.
“We are absolutely not in the spirit of the Capitol,” Dessigny said. “On the contrary, this meeting is about calming and channelling people’s anger. So many voters have got in touch that we had to do something to reassure them.
“We know political opponents will attack us. For years they tried to demonise us, saying we were crazy, neo-Nazi, antisemitic … But today, people know we’re just like everyone else. We don’t want to get elected at any price, we defend our ideas.”
The RN said it had gained 20,000 new members in the four days after Le Pen’s conviction, and half a million people had signed a petition on the party’s website to support Le Pen.
But several polls showed a majority of people across France clearly approved Le Pen’s conviction. One poll by Cluster 17 for Le Point found 61% thought her sentence was justified. Another Elabe poll found a majority of French people felt it was a normal conviction given the crimes she was accused of.
For Le Pen’s electoral standing to grow she needs to expand beyond her core base and gain support from pensioners, the traditional right and higher-earners. But those new supporters now appear much harder to win over. Sunday’s Paris rally seems primarily intended to show Le Pen’s historic supporters that she is not dead politically and will appeal the verdict.
In Villers-Cotterêts, a rural town of around 10,500 people north east of Paris, the views at the market were mixed. The town, which has had a RN mayor for more than a decade, is famous for being the historic home of the revolutionary General Dumas, born to a French nobleman and an African slave, and father to the writer Alexandre Dumas. Last year, the centrist president Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the town’s restored castle as a museum to celebrate the French language.
Paul, who used to run a charcuterie shop, and his wife, Marceline, who had worked as a housekeeper on Paris’s left bank, said they were standing by Le Pen. “This wouldn’t change our vote for the party,” Paul said. “The RN vote is rising here because people want change.”
Hugues, 64, a former chef who now worked as a delivery driver to markets, once voted for the socialist François Mitterrand, but now always chooses Le Pen. “I think judges have done this to her deliberately, in order to break her because she’s leading in public opinion,” he said. “I’ll still back her.”
Danièle, a former Paris restaurant manager said: “I’m against injustice and I think Le Pen was targeted politically. She’s a fighter, she’ll stand firm.”
Others disagreed. A market worker in his 30s said: “Sorry but if you’re a crook, you pay. Of course the judges’ verdict makes sense.”
Catherine, 73, a retired nurse and healthcare manager, said: “Any ordinary person would go to jail, so why shouldn’t a politician face a tough sentence. It’s absolutely crazy to have a rally in Paris, she’s a crook.”
Céline, 45, an estate agent, had once voted for the right’s Nicolas Sarkozy but has since abstained. Part of a demographic of non-voters that Le Pen is seeking to court, she said the RN’s leader had “lost credibility” over the embezzlement verdict.
Some Le Pen supporters said the 29-year-old party president Jordan Bardella could be an alternative in the presidential race. Noël, a former tiler, said: “I’m for Marine Le Pen all the way, but if Bardella stands as a new face for the party he could do well.”
The town’s RN mayor, Franck Briffaut, said if the judges had wanted to scupper Le Pen’s political future, it could backfire: “New people have joined the party this week, and I think more people will actually come to us now.”
