Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at another shake-up in French politics, the devastating earthquake in Myanmar, and Israeli reoccupation efforts in Gaza.
Le Pen Sentence Takes Her Out of the Running
A French criminal court found far-right politician Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement in a decision announced on Monday, effectively preventing the current front-runner in the country’s 2027 presidential election from participating.
Le Pen and 24 other officials from the National Rally party were accused of illegally using $4.8 million in European Parliament funds earmarked for European Union parliamentary aides to instead pay party staff between 2004 and 2016. Nine European Parliament members, including Le Pen, and 12 assistants were found guilty.
Presiding judge Bénédicte de Perthuis said on Monday that Le Pen’s actions amounted to a “serious and lasting attack on the rules of democratic life in Europe, but especially in France.” Le Pen has called the allegations a “witch hunt” against Europe’s increasingly popular populist movement.
A three-judge panel sentenced Le Pen to a five-year ban on seeking public office, including in the snap parliamentary elections that President Emmanuel Macron is likely to hold before his term ends as well as the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen also faces four years in prison, with two of those years suspended and the other two to be served under house arrest, and a $108,000 fine.
Le Pen’s lawyer said she will appeal the verdict, but such a process could take years, and the far-right lawmaker will remain ineligible to run for president during that time.
“There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent,” Le Pen told the court, referring to the party’s results in snap elections last year. “So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”
According to an opinion poll published on Sunday, Le Pen would receive somewhere between 34 percent and 37 percent of the vote in a presidential election if it were held now—more than 10 points ahead of her nearest rival.
The daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen has rebranded her nationalist party as the National Rally, seeking to distance it from past accusations of xenophobia and antisemitism. Yet the party still embraces far-right and anti-immigrant ideals, and under Le Pen’s tutelage, it became the largest single party in France’s National Assembly following last summer’s snap elections.
“Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is being unjustly condemned: It is French democracy that is being executed,” National Rally leader Jordan Bardella posted on X on Monday. The 29-year-old protégé of Le Pen is the most likely candidate to replace her on the 2027 ballot.
Other far-right leaders around the world were quick to denounce the ruling. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban posted “Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine!”) on social media, and Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini wrote that this was a “declaration of war by Brussels.”
But within France, even mainstream politicians expressed uncertainty about the harsh sentence. This verdict puts “a very heavy weight on our democracy,” said French conservative lawmaker Laurent Wauquiez, a political opponent of Le Pen’s.
Today’s Most Read
The World This Week
Tuesday, April 1: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hosts Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot hosts Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in Paris.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosts Argentine Foreign Minister Gerardo Werthein in Washington.
Wednesday, April 2: The United States’ “reciprocal” tariffs go into effect.
EU defense ministers begin a two-day meeting in Warsaw.
Thursday, April 3: U.S. auto tariffs go into effect.
Uzbekistan starts hosting the first two-day EU-Central Asia summit.
NATO foreign ministers begin a two-day meeting in London.
Saturday, April 5: The deadline for Chinese company ByteDance to either divest from video app TikTok or face a potential U.S. ban expires.
Monday, April 7: Macron begins a two-day trip to Egypt.
What We’re Following
Rising death toll in Myanmar. Rescue efforts are ongoing after a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck near Mandalay, Myanmar, on Friday. According to local officials, the death toll in the region has surpassed 2,000 people, with many buildings reduced to rubble.
Several countries have already pledged assistance. The United Nations said it was rushing to send supplies to Myanmar, and China, India, and Thailand have all delivered relief materials. The United States has promised $2 million in aid, but U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to humanitarian organizations, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, have hindered this effort.
Experts worry that Myanmar’s ongoing civil war could make it difficult for aid to reach survivors, even as rebels declare a temporary cease-fire in the affected areas. Limited internet, power outages, and fuel shortages are expected to exacerbate these issues.
“Even before this earthquake, nearly 20 million people in Myanmar were in need of humanitarian assistance,” said Marcoluigi Corsi, UNICEF’s representative to Myanmar.
Israel escalates in Gaza. The Israeli military plans to reoccupy 25 percent of Gaza over the next two to three weeks, a senior Israeli official said on Monday. The ground operation is part of the country’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Hamas—a strategy that also included sweeping evacuation orders across the southern Gaza city of Rafah and the surrounding area on Monday.
The announcement delivers another blow to the cease-fire deal reached in January, which Hamas and the conflict’s Arab mediators maintain that they still support. Later stages of that deal would establish a permanent end to the war and have Israel fully withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this month, Israel threatened to permanently seize parts of the enclave if Hamas does not release all its remaining hostages. Some analysts warn that reoccupation could be an Israeli pretense to force Palestinians to leave the territory, something that Trump has also championed; legal experts warn that mass displacement could amount to ethnic cleansing.
However, others suggest that seizing control of Gaza would force Israel to become responsible for the roughly 2 million Palestinians who remain in the war-torn territory.
Stocks drop as tariffs loom. Global stocks declined on Monday ahead of U.S. tariffs set to take effect this week. On Wednesday, dubbed “Liberation Day” by Trump, the United States will impose hefty reciprocal tariffs against virtually all of its trading partners. On Thursday, 25 percent duties on imported automobiles will also go into effect.
Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq indexes dropped roughly 1 percent at one point on Monday, though the Dow was up by around 50 points by midday. Trump does not appear concerned, saying on Sunday that “this country is going to boom.”
But a new CNBC survey reported on Monday that first-quarter GDP growth for the United States this year will be just 0.3 percent; during the last quarter of 2024, U.S. GDP rose by 2.4 percent.
The upcoming tariffs aren’t likely to be the last round, either. On Sunday, Trump threatened to impose 25 percent to 50 percent secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian oil if he feels that Moscow is undermining peace talks with Ukraine. In response, the Kremlin said on Monday that it was working with U.S. officials on ideas for a possible peace plan.
Odds and Ends
In a bid to attract younger voters, some U.K. Labour Party parliamentarians are urging fellow lawmakers to get on social media. “Low trust in politics, low turnout, lack of sense of delivery—those aren’t things we are going to change with a nice Times headline,” one unnamed Labour figure told the Guardian on Sunday.
The group, consisting of about 110 Labour members, believes that all liberal politicians should be on TikTok and YouTube in order to reach members of Generation Z. “We have to be where people are—and especially for young men and those considering populist alternatives, that’s on new media,” the Labour figure said.
