Marine Le Pen's career has been resurrected – and she is a bigger threat than ever | Mujtaba Rahman

No longer banned from next year’s presidential election, Le Pen is a far more formidable force than her understudy, Jordan Bardella France loves a battle-scarred survivor. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac clawed their way back from political failure to become presidents of the republic. There is a significant chance that Marine Le Pen will be next. Now that the Paris appeal court has unshackled her from an electoral ban for fraud, the far-right veteran has double appeal in the race for the French presidency next year. She will run, as always, as an outsider and a scourge of the political elites – despite continuously holding electoral office since 1998. She can also now pose as a “miraculous survivor”, a “mother courage” and “a battling granny”, as senior French political figures, including former ministers, described her to me during recent conversations in Paris. Le Pen will be a much more formidable candidate than her young understudy Jordan Bardella might have been. The other candidates were wary of Bardella, but they did not fear him. They do fear a resurrected Le Pen. Her party, the National Rally (RN), has a new campaign slogan: “R