He was so angry that, with a sudden gesture, he knocked over his beer. Anthony Duquin, a roofer and dog breeder, couldn't contain his anger: "They orchestrated everything for it to end like this! This trial was nonsense. And now, Marine can't be a candidate! France has become a dictatorship." Thierry Venant, who was also a regular at the sports betting bar on the outskirts of the northern French town of Hénin-Beaumont, tried to calm Duquin down: "We'll win in 2027. [Jordan] Bardella will be elected, don't worry."

Hénin-Beaumont is the former mining basin town in which far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party leader Marine Le Pen was elected as a municipal councillor in 2008 – a seat she later relinquished, in 2014, due to a law against holding multiple elected offices. She is also the town's MP and holds her annual political rally there, during a local street market in September. She strolls among the stalls, on her home turf, and, every few steps, stops to talk to her supporters. For them, she is "from the region, even if she wasn't born here," insisted a patron, who no longer votes because "they're all thieves, period." Even Le Pen? He shrugged and turned back to his stack of scratch cards.

At the bar La Paix, in the town's center, a few meters from the local Parti Communiste (left) office, where a large photo of historic communist leader Maurice Thorez gazed out over the empty Monday streets, when all the stores were closed, Bernard Graziani and Farid Ainaoui stood at the counter. The television was not tuned to the 24-hour news channels. Instead, phones gradually shared the news. Graziani, a retired plasterer and grandson of Italian immigrants, had given up on voting long ago. "There have been so many lies," yet, all the same, he had sympathy for RN Mayor Steeve Briois because "at least he doesn't connive. Marine Le Pen might have embezzled, but no more than the others."

His friend Ainaoui tried to make sense of the trial, between the prosecution's requests in their closing statements and the decision issued on Monday. He thought it had already been settled. It won't change his life one bit. "What I'm waiting for is social housing," said Ainaoui, a former shopkeeper in Paris from Algeria's Kabyle minority, before launching into a tirade against "the Arabs and Blacks who arrive and have the right to everything." The barman rolled his eyes and turned back to his coffee machine.

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