Paris

For a Right-wing conservative who once revelled in the nickname “Le Top Cop”, prison time is going to be hard for Nicolas Sarkozy. A cell is already assigned for the former French president at the infamous La Santé — one of the toughest maximum-security jails in Paris — after he was found guilty yesterday of “criminal conspiracy”. This charge related to millions of dollars in laundered cash delivered to his aides by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Crucially, however, the verdict made it clear that the money was not used to fund Sarkozy’s election win in 2007, which enabled his five years in power. This was a clear attempt by Judge Nathalie Gavarino to disassociate the scandal with a chronic failure in French democracy. She aimed to show that Sarkozy’s 2007 victory was a genuine triumph for a self-declared populist, even as she laid bare his personal shortcomings.

Thus, Sarkozy will serve another five-year-term — this time inside the walls of La Santé — while retaining his status as a former president entitled, ironically, to enjoy round-the-clock security. An appeal against the sentence will not prevent him from being put in handcuffs next month, and placed in a VIP wing euphemistically dubbed the “special area” by prison chiefs.

Those of us who were at the Paris Correctional Court yesterday, to watch firsthand the latest episode in his fall, sensed Sarko’s fear. “I am innocent. This justice is a scandal,” he pleaded, while surrounded by three telegenic sons and his third wife, the former supermodel Carla Bruni. In a clear indication that he had not prepared a “Go to Jail” speech, he garbled: “Hatred definitely has no limits. If they want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison but with my head held high.”

Sarkozy even attempted to invoke Dreyfus-style miscarriages of justice. “Those who hate me this much think they will humiliate me,” he said. “But what they have humiliated today is France, the image of France.” He was blaming the prejudices of Leftist judges and a politically motivated media for his demise, and his wife churlishly swiped the court microphone belonging to Mediapart, the Paris investigative news outlet which uncovered much of the evidence used to convict the former president.

What Bruni did not mention is that she too is currently an indicted suspect, facing a decade in prison for witness tampering during the Gaddafi investigation. Hard evidence against her includes seized phone data, and it is as compelling as that used against her husband.

The truth is that lawfare played no discernible part in this case, just as it played no part in Sarkozy’s other two criminal convictions — one for attempting to bribe a judge, and another for illegal campaign funding. Instead, years of hard digging by technical experts and a determination to uncover computer records, audio recordings and official documents contributed to the successful prosecutions. The interminably slow wheels of French justice are easily manipulated by the rich and powerful but, in Sarkozy’s case, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) offered an analysis that could not be faulted.

It was the same kind that led to the recent embezzlement conviction of would-be French president Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (RN), and indeed of François Fillon, Sarkozy’s former prime minister, who was found guilty in 2020 of stealing taxpayers’ money by pretending his wife was his personal assistant. In the Le Pen case (she is also appealing a guilty verdict, while remaining free), the trial judge received credible death threats, and had to be given police protection. Responding to the campaign against her, Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis said: “Equality before the law is a pillar of democracy. Elected officials enjoy no impunity.”

As serial offender Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly discovered, breaking the law can carry serious consequences — no matter who you are or what field you work in. But there is no reason to conflate this conviction with an assault on democracy, simply because it involves a high-profile politician.

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Peter Allen is a journalist and author based in Paris.

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