The Ex-President Who Went to Jail

France and America have a lot in frequent: parallel 18th-century revolutions, a shared dedication to common beliefs, the identical three colours on the flag. And each international locations have just lately put their establishments via an unprecedented stress take a look at. They every put a flamboyant ex-president on trial for severe, election-related crimes.

Nicolas Sarkozy, whose Paris corruption trial resulted in September, responded to his accusers with the form of bombast and fury which have lengthy been Donald Trump’s trademark. He likened himself to Alfred Dreyfus and Edmond Dantès, unjustly maligned heroes of French historical past and fiction. Trump went additional throughout his personal trials, invoking Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa—however he has all the time been prolific together with his self-flattering analogies, having likened himself to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Elvis Presley.

The French can now make a flattering comparability of their very own. Sarkozy was convicted of conspiring to fund his 2007 marketing campaign with tens of millions of euros from Muammar Qaddafi, the previous Libyan dictator. Unlike Trump, he was given a five-year sentence and went to jail. The humiliation led him to embrace the far proper, a selection which will reverberate via French politics. The first former French president in fashionable historical past to serve time, he was launched in November pending an attraction. He served three weeks at La Santé, a jail infamous for overcrowding, vermin, and violence. (As a VIP, Sarkozy had his personal cell and bodyguards.)

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The conviction was a victory of kinds for France’s justice system, which held up underneath a withering marketing campaign of abuse by Sarkozy and his allies. The judges dominated that Sarkozy was responsible of “exceptionally serious acts, likely to undermine the citizens’ confidence in those who represent them and who are supposed to act both in the general interest, and in the interest of the institutions of the republic itself.” It was a victory for France’s media, too: A left-wing digital newspaper, Mediapart, broke the story of Sarkozy’s Libya connection in 2012, setting off the judicial inquiry.

Admittedly, not everybody felt that approach. The French retain a quasi-monarchical reverence for the presidency, and Sarkozy performed on these emotions with a usually hyperbolic effort to reclaim the narrative, as if he had been Napoleon escaping from Elba. His e-book The Diary of a Prisoner, rushed into print in December barely a month after his launch, begins with Sarkozy getting into jail carrying a biography of Jesus. What follows is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy, as Sarkozy describes the privations of his “hell”: the awkwardly positioned mirror, the uncomfortable mattress, the “not very appealing” meals, and the person within the neighboring cell who insisted on performing songs from The Lion King at odd hours.

This self-aggrandizing aria discovered a big viewers, promoting greater than 100,000 copies in its first week and topping the charts on Amazon. It is a becoming coda to a political profession whose hallmark—as Sarkozy concedes within the e-book—has been audacity quite than expertise. He first gained a nationwide profile in 1993 when a person strapped with explosives and calling himself the “human bomb” entered a kindergarten within the Paris suburb the place Sarkozy was mayor, took the kids hostage, and threatened to blow them up. Sarkozy rushed to the scene, handed via the police cordon, entered the varsity alone, and managed to barter the kids’s launch. (The police then shot the person useless.)

Like Donald Trump, Sarkozy has all the time had a rabid starvation for consideration. The French media used to name him a bête de scene, a “stage animal”; considered one of France’s most well-known rappers, Kaaris, has admiringly known as Sarkozy the “most gangster” of all of France’s politicians. And like his American counterpart, Sarkozy calls for complete loyalty. An editorialist for Le Monde as soon as wrote that with Sarkozy, it’s “allegiance or vengeance.”

When Mediapart first reported the declare that Sarkozy had taken 50 million euros from Qaddafi, many individuals didn’t know what to make of it. The crime appeared audacious even for him, and the story was arduous to observe, stuffed with unreliable middlemen and paperwork of unsure authenticity. (Mediapart produced a wonderful documentary laying out the background of the case and the sturdy circumstantial proof.)

I bear in mind feeling somewhat baffled even after I met one of many central figures within the drama: Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the late dictator’s son, who claimed to have helped present cash to Sarkozy’s 2007 marketing campaign. This was in 2021, and Saif al-Islam—who had spent a decade in hiding after being kidnapped by rebels in 2011—mentioned some unhinged issues throughout our interview. But I bear in mind being struck by the conviction with which he predicted that Sarkozy would find yourself in jail.

The reality is that the accusations should not so unusual. There is a protracted and sordid historical past of French politicians squeezing cash from African dictators, a legacy of the postcolonial nexus of money and affect often known as Françafrique (the phrase itself is a double entendre, that means each “France-Africa” and “France-cash”). One of the lads who oversaw this method, Robert Bourgi, printed a e-book in 2024 titled They Know I Know It All, which particulars the common supply of tens of millions of {dollars} in money—together with banknotes stuffed into djembe drums—from African heads of state to the campaigns of outstanding French statesmen.

My personal guess is that Sarkozy could have justified the gambit to himself on the grounds  that Qaddafi owed France. The Libyan regime seems to have been chargeable for the bombing of a Paris-bound civilian flight in 1989 that killed 170 folks. Tripoli later paid compensation to the victims’ households. For Sarkozy—who, at 5 foot 5, is an inch shorter than his idol Napoleon—a debt to France may as properly be a debt to him.

Sarkozy’s jail sentence might also replicate a toughening of French attitudes towards corruption, which had been as soon as comparatively lax. No one made a lot fuss in 1994, when it emerged that François Mitterrand, the long-serving French president, had lodged his mistress and their daughter in an opulent Paris residence on the state’s expense. But in 2017, the conservative politician François Fillon was accused of arranging fictitious authorities jobs for his spouse and kids, and it destroyed his marketing campaign for president. The French far-right chief Marine Le Pen was convicted early final 12 months of diverting European Parliament funds to pay for her employees’s salaries, and she or he was sentenced to a five-year ban from public workplace (she is at the moment interesting it).

This diminished tolerance for graft has coincided with highly effective populist currents lately, main many French political figures (together with at the very least one on the far left) to shed their former respect for the judiciary and accuse their enemies of fabricating authorized instances in opposition to them. Sarkozy has banged this drum louder than anybody, asserting that leftist judges have focused him via a “hatred without limits.” This has been a frequent chorus on CNews, the French equal of Fox News (owned by Sarkozy’s shut pal, the billionaire Vincent Bolloré). Across the Atlantic, Trump has made related accusations of “lawfare” in opposition to him by the Biden administration, which at the moment are gospel within the MAGA motion.

Unlike Trump, Sarkozy is a determine of the middle proper. He supported Emmanuel Macron, France’s embattled centrist president, in each the 2017 and 2022 elections. Sarkozy has vigorously defended the “republican front” that has, for many years, joined the precise and the left in an settlement to maintain the French excessive proper, with its historic connections to fascism, out of energy.

But the bombshell buried inside Sarkozy’s melodramatic Diary of a Prisoner was his declaration that he now not sees any motive to carry the far proper at bay. This volte-face was not nearly electoral politics. As Sarkozy notes appreciatively in his e-book, Le Pen, in contrast to many different political luminaries, got here out in help of him after his sentencing. Sarkozy provides that Le Pen could have been motivated by her personal authorized troubles: “No doubt the judicial situation could bring us together.”

Here was one more parallel with Trump, whose sympathy for fellow defendants has prompted him to pardon a rogue’s gallery of convicts together with Juan Orlando Hernández, the previous president of Honduras convicted of conspiring with drug cartels to maneuver tons of of tons of cocaine to the United States.

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Sarkozy’s authorized troubles are removed from over. In addition to the Libya-related verdict that he’s now interesting, he has been convicted in two different corruption trials since he left workplace in 2012, and he faces separate costs of making an attempt to stress a key witness within the Libya case. The French public’s endurance with him seems to be carrying skinny. In a ballot performed in late September, a stable majority mentioned that they discovered the decision in opposition to him to be pretty administered, and 72 p.c mentioned they had been shocked by the right-wing slanders in opposition to the judges within the case.

But Sarkozy likes lengthy odds. “The rest of the story has not been written,” he posted on social media after his launch from jail, and he doesn’t appear to be envisioning a quiet retirement. Sarkozy nonetheless has a robust voice in conservative circles, and if he chooses to throw his weight into a brand new union des droites, as many in France now worry, he may play a key function in bringing the far proper to energy for the primary time.

That could be an odd form of victory, as a result of Sarkozy’s get together, the Republicans, could be swallowed by Le Pen’s a lot bigger Rassemblement National. But sacrificing ideas for energy is just not more likely to be a tough selection for Sarkozy. He could select to see the merger as an opportunity to return from the political graveyard for a final snort at his enemies. There, too, he could be following a script written by Donald Trump.