The recent conviction of 70-year-old former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) for criminal conspiracy and corruption marked the final humiliation of a rabidly right-wing figure who thrived on dog whistle politics of hatred towards France’s Maghrebi, Muslim, and black migrants. In a notoriously racist speech in Dakar in 2007, Sarkozy had noted: “Africans have never really entered history … there is no room either for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress.”
The former French president was sentenced to five years in prison for soliciting funds from Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 presidential campaign. This was a murky tale that again exposed a six-decade system of corrupt cronyism dubbed Françafrique, in which some French political parties had illicitly obtained political campaign funds from African dictators in exchange for protecting these autocrats.
The investigation of Sarkozy began in 2013, two years after Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, accused Sarkozy of taking millions of dollars from his father to finance his presidential campaign. In 2012, shady Lebanese-French business person Ziad Takieddine claimed that he had handed €5m in cash to Sarkozy and had proof of €50m in campaign funds having been paid by Tripoli to Sarkozy’s campaign. The mercurial Takieddine later recanted (a case is still pending against Sarkozy and his wife for pressuring a witness) before reinstating his accusation shortly before his death from a heart attack in Beirut two days before the Sarkozy verdict. Other shadowy figures in this sordid drama involved Libyan spies, convicted terrorists and assorted arms dealers.
Though French prosecutors accused Sarkozy of a “Faustian corruption pact”, they missed a crucial point in assuming that the corrupter was Faust rather than the devil. Sarkozy was accused of seeking funds from Gaddafi in exchange for rehabilitating the Libyan dictator’s image in the West and winning lucrative economic deals once Sarkozy became president. Two of the French president’s former ministerial aides were also found guilty. To make matters worse, Sarkozy’s supermodel-singer wife, Carla Bruni, was charged last year with concealing evidence linked to the Gaddafi case.
Sarkozy would repay Gaddafi four years after scrounging funds from him by instigating the Nato intervention — alongside Britain’s David Cameron and America’s Barack Obama — resulting in the assassination of the Libyan leader, proving in this case that there is no honour among thieves.
A sleaze-ridden French political elite has often assumed it was above the law.
Sarkozy has had a history of scandal, having twice been convicted in 2021. He became the first post-war French president to be sentenced to jail when he bagged one year of house arrest after being found guilty of bribery and influence-spending. He had been accused of seeking to obtain information from a senior magistrate, Gilbert Azibert, in 2014, in a case against him of illegal campaign payments. Sarkozy was subsequently convicted for exceeding campaign spending limits in his unsuccessful 2012 presidential re-election campaign and ordered to spend a year in jail (with six months suspended). In June, he was stripped of his Légion d’honneur: France’s highest national award.
A sleaze-ridden French political elite has often assumed it was above the law. Marine Le Pen, leader of the xenophobic National Rally, was barred from holding public office for five years in March after her party was found to have embezzled €2.9m of EU parliamentary funds through a fake jobs scam that lasted 12 years. Former French president Jacques Chirac had earlier been handed a suspended sentence in 2011 for abusing public funds while serving as mayor of Paris.
Sarkozy is expected in Paris’s La Santé prison this week, where he will have an individual cell and be allowed one hour’s exercise and three visits a week.
- Prof Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
