Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted on his own innocence and decried what he called a politically-motivated conspiracy of revenge against him as he was ordered to become the first leader from the modern French state to go to jail.
A Paris court found former French President Nicolas Sarkozy guilty on Thursday morning over criminal conspiracy in relation to a broadly unproven alleged plot earlier this century to use money from the then Libyan government of dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to fund Sarkozy’s 2007 Presidential Election campaign. The court said it had been unable to prove any money ever actually changed hands, but said it was satisfied an attempt to get money from Libya had taken place, and that corruption schemes are illegal under French law even if they are unsuccessful.
Hours later, President Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in prison. He wasn’t taken to prison immediately — sparing him the indignity of being led from the courthouse in handcuffs — and instead will be privately notified of a time and place to report to a prison to begin his incarceration. Despite that courtesy, the judge ruled Sarkozy launching an appeal against his conviction would not be able to delay prison, and he’d have to fight to overturn the ruling from his cell.
Other charges including illegal campaign financing and concealing embezzlement were dropped.
Sarkozy said the initial claims against him, now made well over a decade ago, were fakes by the Libyan government “Gaddafi clan” and its agents as an act of revenge against him, because he’d sided with rebels during the Arab Spring and had supported the notion of getting Colonel Gaddafi out of power. This is not exactly proven, but the court has latterly acknowledged that some of the earliest documents making allegations against Sarkozy are in fact fakes.
Sarkozy decried what he called a political witch-hunt against him from the court house on Thursday and railed against the judges. He said even if he had to go to prison, he would do so with his conscience clear. Sarkozy thundered: “If they absolutely want me to sleep in prison, I will sleep in prison. But with my head held high. I am innocent. This injustice is a scandal.
French broadsheet Le Figaro reports Sarkozy warned the public that: “What happened today is extremely serious for the rule of law, for the confidence we can have in justice” and vowed he would appeal to prove his “innocence”. He continued: “I ask the French people – whether they voted for me or not, whether they support me or not – to grasp what has just happened. So, hatred truly knows no limits”.
The court case and ruling has divided French politics along predictable party lines. As reported, a former party colleague has denounced the legal case against the one-time President as being like “the guillotine of Louis XIV”, in reference to the French Revolution. Several Republican senators called for President Macron to give Sarkozy a Presidential Pardon.
Others, particularly from France’s ascendent left-wing, celebrated the verdict that saw the centre-right politician condemned to jail. Leftist Member of Parliament hailed the “independence of the judiciary from political power” and said the jailing of a former President should bring down the whole Republic.
French right-wing-sovereigntist Marine Le Pen, who is presently subject to court proceedings over alleged embezzlement charges was particularly scathing of Sarkozy’s sentence, in particular the order that the prison element be activated even though the appeals process has not yet been exhausted. Le Pen has been subjected to a similar ruling, with a court imposing a total ban on her participating in elections — a serious matter for the head of France’s top-polling political party with national elections on the horizon — and ordering this come into force immediately, not after the appeals process.
Le Pen said the new use of making punishments immediate for politicians is “a great danger with regard to the great principles of our law, first and foremost among which is the presumption of innocence.”
Editor’s note: this article was corrected on September 25th to correctly state that Colonel Gaddafi was the Leader of Libya
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