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 by way of an unprecedented stress take a look at. They every put a flamboyant ex-president on trial for critical, election-related crimes.
Nicolas Sarkozy, whose Paris corruption trial led to September, responded to his accusers with the sort 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 Mom Teresa—however he has at all times 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. In contrast to Trump, he was given a five-year sentence and went to jail. The humiliation led him to embrace the far proper, a alternative which will reverberate by way of French politics. The primary former French president in trendy 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.)
The conviction was a victory of types for France’s justice system, which held up below a withering marketing campaign of abuse by Sarkozy and his allies. The judges dominated that Sarkozy was responsible of “exceptionally critical acts, prone to undermine the residents’ confidence in those that symbolize them and who’re presupposed to act each within the normal curiosity, and within the curiosity of the establishments 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 manner. 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 have been Napoleon escaping from Elba. His guide The Diary of a Prisoner, rushed into print in December barely a month after his launch, begins with Sarkozy coming 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 interesting” 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’s a becoming coda to a political profession whose hallmark—as Sarkozy concedes within the guide—has been audacity fairly 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 youngsters hostage, and threatened to blow them up. Sarkozy rushed to the scene, handed by way of the police cordon, entered the varsity alone, and managed to barter the youngsters’s launch. (The police then shot the person lifeless.)
Like Donald Trump, Sarkozy has at all times had a rabid starvation for consideration. The French media used to name him a bête de scene, a “stage animal”; one among 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 comply with, 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 just a little 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—stated some unhinged issues throughout our interview. However 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 usually are not so unusual. There’s a lengthy and sordid historical past of French politicians squeezing cash from African dictators, a legacy of the postcolonial nexus of money and affect referred to as Françafrique (the phrase itself is a double entendre, that means each “France-Africa” and “France-cash”). One of many males who oversaw this method, Robert Bourgi, revealed a guide 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 very own guess is that Sarkozy might have justified the gambit to himself on the grounds that Qaddafi owed France. The Libyan regime seems to have been answerable for the bombing of a Paris-bound civilian flight in 1989 that killed 170 individuals. 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 would possibly as properly be a debt to him.
Sarkozy’s jail sentence can also replicate a toughening of French attitudes towards corruption, which have been as soon as comparatively lax. Nobody 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 condominium on the state’s expense. However in 2017, the conservative politician François Fillon was accused of arranging fictitious authorities jobs for his spouse and youngsters, and it destroyed his marketing campaign for president. The French far-right chief Marine Le Pen was convicted early final yr of diverting European Parliament funds to pay for her workers’s salaries, and he or she was sentenced to a five-year ban from public workplace (she is presently interesting it).
This lowered tolerance for graft has coincided with highly effective populist currents in recent times, main many French political figures (together with no less than one on the far left) to shed their former respect for the judiciary and accuse their enemies of fabricating authorized circumstances towards them. Sarkozy has banged this drum louder than anybody, asserting that leftist judges have focused him by way of a “hatred with out limits.” This has been a frequent chorus on CNews, the French equal of Fox Information (owned by Sarkozy’s shut buddy, the billionaire Vincent Bolloré). Throughout the Atlantic, Trump has made comparable accusations of “lawfare” towards him by the Biden administration, which are actually gospel within the MAGA motion.
In contrast to 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 entrance” 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.
However the bombshell buried inside Sarkozy’s melodramatic Diary of a Prisoner was his declaration that he not sees any cause to carry the far proper at bay. This volte-face was not nearly electoral politics. As Sarkozy notes appreciatively in his guide, Le Pen, in contrast to many different political luminaries, got here out in help of him after his sentencing. Sarkozy provides that Le Pen might have been motivated by her personal authorized troubles: “Little doubt the judicial state of affairs may carry us collectively.”
Right 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 a whole lot of tons of cocaine to america.
Sarkozy’s authorized troubles are removed from over. Along with 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 attempting to stress a key witness within the Libya case. The French public’s endurance with him seems to be carrying skinny. In a ballot carried out in late September, a strong majority stated that they discovered the decision towards him to be pretty administered, and 72 % stated they have been shocked by the right-wing slanders towards the judges within the case.
However Sarkozy likes lengthy odds. “The remainder 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 concern, he may play a key function in bringing the far proper to energy for the primary time.
That might be an odd form of victory, as a result of Sarkozy’s occasion, the Republicans, could be swallowed by Le Pen’s a lot bigger Rassemblement Nationale. However sacrificing rules for energy just isn’t prone to be a tough alternative for Sarkozy. He might select to see the merger as an opportunity to return from the political graveyard for a final chuckle at his enemies. There, too, he could be following a script written by Donald Trump.
