There was plenty of melodrama in Nicolas Sarkozy’s denouement inside a Paris court room this week. When the former French president was told he was going to prison for five years, after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy, his eyes bulged and he looked as though he was about to totter over.
As if accusations that he had accepted up to $50 million dollars in laundered cash from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi were not bad enough, he is being sent to La Santé, the toughest jail in Paris.
The 70-year-old Sarkozy was surrounded by family members, including his always flamboyant third wife, Carla Bruni. The former supermodel and pop singer was (very strangely) smiling broadly, and pulling quizzical faces, as Sarkozy also emoted like a bad support actor struggling with his lines.
Speaking outside the court, just after the devastating verdict, Sarkozy tried – pathetically – to portray himself as the victim of a vast miscarriage of justice. “If they want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison, but with my head held high,” he rambled.
Bruni, meanwhile, sneered as she grabbed a microphone cover belonging to Mediapart – the investigative news outlet that uncovered much of the evidence that helped convict Sarkozy.
Like her husband – a serial offender who has also been found guilty of attempting to bribe a judge, and of illegal campaign funding in separate trials – she has no faith in French journalism that challenges the status quo, nor indeed in French judges, whom she regularly refers to as “Pinocchios”.
Layers of corruptions
It would be funny except that, until relatively recently, Sarkozy and his fiercely egotistical wife were the most powerful couple in France. They married inside the French presidential home, the Élysée Palace, in 2008, at a time when Sarkozy was pledging to revitalise France with his right-wing conservatism.
There would be no compromise with unwelcome immigrants, while Sarkozy also pledged to “blow away” trouble makers on out-of-town estates with a power hose. Meanwhile, he projected himself as a Gallic Margaret Thatcher – a free marketeer ready to unlock his country’s stagnant economy by taking on the trade unions, and encouraging entrepreneurs.
This was also the time when Sarkozy was feting billionaire dictators such as Gaddafi as valued friends, as he tried to attract foreign investment into France. In this sense, he saw himself as an old-style Gaullist – the kind who placed the national interest above any others, and was a stickler for tough law and order policies.
In fact, his latest conviction has exposed him as an abject corruption of a well-meaning patriot. Self-interest ultimately motivated his decision to seek laundered cash from a foreign government. The proven allegations were that cash was coming in from Libya between 2005 and 2007, just before Sarkozy came to power.
In the words of trial Judge Nathalie Gavarino: “You exploited your ministerial position to prepare high-level corruption.”
When the net started to close around Gaddafi, and the Arab uprising threatened his regime, Sarkozy turned against the “Brother Leader”. As commander of France’s Armed Forces, it was Sarkozy who ultimately ordered fighter jets to bomb the Gaddafi regime out of existence, before the dictator himself was hacked to death by a mob in 2011.
There have been claims that Sarkozy wanted Gaddafi, his old friend and ally, dead because of his potential to produce incriminating evidence.
If this sounds like Mafia-style behaviour by Sarkozy, then all the indications are that it was. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy herself is being portrayed as a gangster’s mole, after being charged with “witness tampering in criminal gang” and “fraud” in relation to the Gaddafi case. Both charges come with jail sentences of up to a decade if proven, and the evidence against Bruni-Sarkozy is compelling.
As in her husband’s trials, it is mainly made up of data mined from electronic devices, and not from vague anecdotes. For example, a “ghost phone number” has been linked with Bruni-Sarkozy’s Apple account, according to indictment evidence uncovered by specialists.
Going down in history
It is certainly all a far cry from the days when Bruni-Sarkozy used to dress in dark blue blazers and tailored trousers, as she tried to portray herself as a demure conservative wife. The Italy-born socialite even took on French nationality to ensure she was taken seriously as the country’s première dame.
Now, the most serious presidential corruption scandal in the history of the French Fifth Republic has finally completely destroyed such myths. Sarkozy has already become France’s first ex-president to be convicted for crimes carried out in office (Jacques Chirac, another Gaullist conservative and once Sarkozy’s mentor, was indicted and found guilty of corruption during his time as Mayor of Paris).
Within a few days of Sarkozy losing his presidential immunity from prosecution in 2012, fraud squad detectives raided the Paris home he shared with Bruni-Sarkozy.
The wheels of justice roll slowly in France, but by March 2021 Sarkozy was convicted of corruption and influence peddling and sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended. In January 2024, he failed to overturn a criminal conviction and prison sentence for illegally funding his campaign for re-election in 2012. He was sentenced to one-year in jail, with six months suspended, and served his sentence wearing an electronic tag.
On each occasion, Sarkozy escaped jail time, instead remaining under judicial control, but now he has a cell waiting for him in La Santé’s so-called ‘VIP wing’, where he will be left alone with his thoughts. He might well consider how the Gaddafi case is not just grave because it exposes alleged attacks on democracy, but because of its enormous international consequences.
The destruction of Libya as a functioning state led to a huge increase in people smugglers pouring illegal migrants into Europe. It also allowed terrorist groups to set up bases there as they ransacked anything to do with the West.
Meanwhile, the once moderate and law-abiding conservatives who dominated France’s Gaullist party are currently in very short supply. Now called Les Républicains – a name chosen by Sarkozy – the party only has some 50 places in the 577 National Assembly, the lower house of France’s parliament.
However, the far-Right National Rally are dominating right-wing politics in an increasingly divided country. Their de facto leader, Marine Le Pen, is also a convicted criminal subject to appeal. This year, she was found guilty of embezzling cash from the European Parliament.
Despite this, Le Pen still believes she has a chance of replacing Emmanuel Macron as president in 2027.
Faced with such chaos, the sense of disillusionment and despair among conservative voters is palpable, and Sarkozy-style sleaze is ultimately responsible.
Nabila Ramdani is a French-Algerian Journalist, Broadcaster and Academic & Author of Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic (PublicAffairs/Hurst).
Follow Nabila on Twitter: @NabilaRamdani
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