Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy signing copies of his latest book in Arcachon last August. CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT (AFP)
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (Paris, 68 years old) always looks forward. Even his harshest critics can admit this. He does not practice what is called in France the wooden language, the habit of so many politicians of speaking in empty formulas in order to say nothing. In his latest book, now published in Spanish, he talks about Juan Carlos I and his daughter-in-law, Queen Letizia. It's direct, without detours. “The relationship [entre Juan Carlos y Letizia] “He seemed neither trustworthy nor loving to me,” writes Sarkozy. “I clearly noticed a reluctance that was undoubtedly mutual.”
The reflection appears in the pages of The Years of Struggles (Editorial Alliance, in Spanish) on the official visit to Madrid in 2009. Juan Carlos was still in power and his scandals had not yet broken out. Nor the cases that would shape Sarkozy to this day.
Almost 15 years later, Juan Carlos I has fallen from grace. He lives in Abu Dhabi, far from his country and family, although he has not been charged or convicted. The conservative Sarkozy, president from 2007 to 2012, was convicted on two counts of corruption and illegal financing, appealed and placed on probation. He is considered innocent until the final verdict. He is now awaiting another trial and is charged in a fourth case.
And despite everything, President Emmanuel Macron entertains him. From time to time they have lunch. The last time, according to La Tribune, was at the end of November. What's more: his books are bestsellers. This week he will be in Madrid to present the latest edition, the first in Spanish. The Alianza publishing house is owned by Hachette, part of the Lagardère group, on whose board the former president sits as part of one of his many business activities. Sarkozy never fell from grace like Juan Carlos I. He continues to have influence and is still listened to.
Franz-Olivier Giesbert, author of the juicy trilogy “Intimate History of the Fifth Republic” and leading journalist in newspapers such as “Le Nouvel Observateur,” “Le Figaro” and “Le Point,” feels nostalgia for Sarkozy. “There is nostalgia among part of the right,” he says, although many in the Republicans, a party founded by the former president, do not forgive him for supporting Macron in the 2022 presidential election. “Macron consults him,” says Giesbert, “although I don’t think he listens to him too much.”
That he is consulted and evokes nostalgia may be surprising given his legal past. A French anomaly? Or proof that the court record is not that good and therefore there is no problem maintaining him?
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“Nicolas Sarkozy enjoys a kind of immunity in France because he was president of the republic,” says Fabrice Arfi, investigative journalist at the newspaper Mediapart and author of a short essay on corruption in French politics. Arfi adds: “It is as if this would offer him a wall that would allow him to be more resistant politically and in the media to problems that others could not resist, given the facts very serious given the functions he performs are.” .”
Giesbert believes that Sarkozy is heard and liked by a part of the population “because people don't believe that it is something serious if he is convicted.” “It is terrible for the French justice system,” he complains. He points out: “In any case, I’m not a sarcocyst.”
The anomaly, according to the veteran journalist, is what he calls in his book “the senseless brutality of the judiciary”, as if the judges of the National Financial Prosecutor's Office had decided to put an end to him by any means possible, by putting an electronic bracelet on him before he throws him in a cell until the end of his days and no more will be said!” On the phone he adds: “I am one of those who think that there is not much behind these cases.”
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The revenge came from President Sarkozy criticizing the judges and proposing a reform that they did not like. As the former president tells it in “The Years of Fighting”: “It would not be long before I realized the extent of the hostility that my person had, in a completely unfair way, aroused in a section of the judiciary.”
The former president argues that prosecutors and judges have had the upper hand on him ever since. He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2021, of which he must serve one, for corruption and influence peddling in an alleged exchange of favors with a judge. The appeals court upheld the conviction in May and the former president will go to the Supreme Court. He was sentenced to one year in prison in the 2012 re-election campaign financing case. The appeal process has just ended and the verdict is expected in February. The trial for allegedly financing his 2007 election campaign with money from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya is scheduled for 2025.
After the latest conviction in May, Sarkozy denounced in Le Figaro: “Some judges are waging a political battle.” Unlike left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was charged with confronting a police officer during a search, Sarkozy does not invoke this Lawfare concept to complain about the alleged politicization of the judiciary. But the meaning seems similar. “I call it the poster of impunity: people from different political directions basically saying the same thing,” says Arfi. “This is a destruction of republican grammar.”
“There is something very Berlusconi-like,” says the Mediapart journalist about the former president. “Robbers and traffickers react the same way. They say: “The problem is the prosecutor.” Or: “The judge doesn't want me.” In these cases it means that they defend themselves as best they can, but when it comes to the former president, who is the constitutional guarantor for the independence of the judiciary, it is dramatic for me.” Giesbert takes a contrary position on the allegations and convictions against the former president: “For me it is a campaign of revenge.”
But Sarkozy is not going and will not go. Eleven years after his departure from power, he is still there, hyperactive – “I'm scared,” he once admitted to a judge – and working a double job. Reclaim his legacy, which was destroyed by the financial crisis and the defeat of the socialist François Hollande. And prepare your legal defense. Between the appeals and at least one new trial, he still has years left on the bench.
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