ANDREW NEIL: Our new PM needs to stop drivelling on about Manchester and get across the political earthquakes convulsing Rome, Paris and Berlin

By ANDREW NEIL, DAILY MAIL COLUMNIST Published: 00:59, 11 July 2026 | Updated: 01:05, 11 July 2026 Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Right-wing National Rally, is now the clear favourite to win next year’s presidential election, despite a conviction for fraud, a suspended prison sentence, a €100,000 (£85,000) fine and the possibility she might have to campaign wearing an electronic ankle bracelet to monitor her movements. It is a remarkable prospect for a politician who has already tried and failed three times to win the presidency (2012, 2017 and 2022) and for whom previous court rulings looked like making a fourth run impossible. It places the populist Right on the brink of presidential power for the first time in modern France, with incalculable consequences not just for the French but the European Union. On Tuesday, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld her conviction last year in a lower court for being involved in her party’s misuse of EU funds between 2004 and 2016. But in a somewhat complicated – even contrived – ruling, the appeal court adjusted the sentence in several crucial ways. It reduced the ban on her running for office from five years to 45 months, with 30 of those suspended. Since she had already served 15 months being ineligible to run for public office, hey presto, she was free to stand in the 2027 election. It was almost as if the judges sensed that using the law to stop a presidential frontrunner from entering the race was not a good idea. The judges maintained the €100,000 fine but cut her prison sentence from four years to three, suspended two of them and ruled she didn’t have to be banged up for the remaining one – that could be served under electronic surveillance (hence the ankle tag). Le Pen has announced she will appeal to the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil and criminal matters, which means all penalties are suspended pending the appeal, including electronic monitoring. The court is under pressure to rule early next year, before the traditional two rounds of voting in French presidential elections (this time on April 18 and May 2). The courts have accepted that neither Le Pen nor her colleagues benefited from any ‘personal enrichment’ in the misuse of funds Le Pen has announced she will appeal to the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil and criminal matters If it rules against her appeal then Le Pen will indeed be wearing an ankle bracelet in her final weeks on the campaign trail. That might not be the handicap the French political establishment thinks it will be. She will probably flaunt it as an example of the lengths to which opponents will go to stop her being president. Just as Donald Trump used the numerous court cases against him to his advantage in the 2024 US presidential election by claiming it was the establishment’s misuse of ‘lawfare’ to thwart the democratic process, so Le Pen will assert the same. Outside elite Parisian circles there’s already a lot of scepticism about Le Pen’s conviction. She and others in her party were accused of diverting €2.4million (£2million) of European Parliament funds, meant to pay for the staff of National Rally MEPs, to finance the salaries of party workers in France. It was a misuse of funds, but not exactly Krakatoa on the fraud scale. The European Parliament’s rules on allowances are vague. An investigation three years ago found 139 MEPs – almost one in five – had misused these funds. But very little action was taken. The courts have accepted that neither Le Pen nor her colleagues benefited from any ‘personal enrichment’ in the misuse of funds. Yet they threw the book at her and her party. It’s already backfired. The latest polls show Le Pen winning 36 per cent of the vote in the first round – 13 points more than her actual first round vote share in 2022 and almost double that of her nearest rival. These same polls show her beating any potential rival in the second round. It’s not meant to be like this. When her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a toxic, Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi who founded the party (then called the National Front), made it into the second round in 2002, all the mainstream parties backed his opponent, the centre- Right Jacques Chirac. Even the Chirac-hating Socialist Party fell in line, though it did campaign under the slogan: ‘Vote for the crook, not the fascist.’ It worked. Chirac won with an 82 per cent share of the vote to Le Pen’s 18 per cent. Even though his daughter has done much to detoxify the party since, she’s faced the same ganging up when she’s made it to the second round. She lost 66:34 to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 59:41, again to Macron, in 2022. Notice, however, that each time the mainstream majority declines. The fear gripping France’s political establishment is that the ‘ganging up’ no longer works and the National Rally is no longer seen by enough voters as a political pariah. The fundamental reason for this is that the centre no longer holds sway in France. Macron destroyed the French equivalent of Labour and Tory parties in his 2017 landslide. Neither made it into the second round. They’ve never recovered. A cacophony of centrists are mulling a presidential bid next year. None has the makings of a winner. The establishment’s nightmare is they merely split the centrist vote and not just let Le Pen into the second round but also Jean-Luc Melenchon, a bloviating socialist dinosaur to the left of even Jeremy Corbyn. A run-off between Le Pen and Melenchon would be a foregone conclusion: the latest second-round poll has her with a 70 per cent vote share. Collapse of the centre, indeed. Thus would French politics be transformed. Le Pen has dragged her National Rally more into the mainstream but is still pretty hard-Right on immigration, law and order and national sovereignty over European federalism. The party has junked talk of a ‘Frexit’ or reinstating the French franc. But a President Le Pen would be the end of business as usual for the European Commission in the Brussels Berlaymont. Europe’s political weather is already changing. The populist Right has been in charge of Italy for four years with Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government. If joined by Le Pen in Paris, it would be a formidable enough double- act to give Brussels palpitations. The German coalition is still controlled by the mainstream parties of the Left and Right. But it is weak and its economy is faltering. The hard-Right Alternative for Deutschland came second in the last federal elections and now regularly tops the polls, with just under 30 per cent. It’s unlikely ever to form a government in Berlin but it can influence from the sidelines – as the populist Right Sweden Democrats are doing in Stockholm. These are parlous times for the consensus political forces that have dominated Europe for so long. It’s time they were shaken up since they have presided over an increasingly stagnant continent. But the rise of the populist Right is fraught with danger, too. It is too cosy with the Kremlin when Russia is once again a clear threat. And it has no appetite for slashing Europe’s bloated welfare budgets and moving resources into defence. Le Pen, for one, is suspiciously silent about defence spending, and wants to cut the retirement age from 63 to 60. Our Labour Government needs to take stock, too. Under Keir Starmer and, soon, Andy Burnham, it blithely talks about getting closer to Brussels, perhaps even as a prelude to rejoining, as if the EU now is the same as the one we voted to leave in 2016 – or will be in however many years it takes to negotiate re-entry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fundamental change is afoot. It started in Rome. Paris could be next, with the shock waves reverberating even in the hitherto solid EU citadels of Berlin and Stockholm. Our new PM would be wise to stop drivelling on about Manchester and get across what is happening on the other side of the Channel – while committing to nothing until the lie of the land becomes much clearer. Faking football: How to bluff your way through England's quarter-final clash with Norway - from Bellingham's and Haaland's 'bromance'... to manager Thomas Tuchel's steamy love life