The sentence looks primed to set off a firestorm on the far right, both in France and across Europe. A visibly stunned Marine Le Pen hurried through swaths of reporters as she stormed out of the Paris courthouse at midday and reportedly stammered “unbelievable” before making her way to party headquarters in west Paris.

The thunderclap court ruling barring far-right politician Marine Le Pen from office for five years has reverberated across the political spectrum of France and Europe

Mathieu Carpentier, a constitutional law expert at Toulouse Capitole University, rejected the idea that Le Pen was a victim of "judicial warfare". The evidence against her was str