Outside the Beltway

Nicolas Sarkozy Jailed

He becomes the first French ex-head of state to be jailed since Marshal Pétain.

James Joyner · Tuesday, October 21, 2025 · 5 comments

BBC (“French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence for campaign finance conspiracy“):

Nicolas Sarkozy has become the first French ex-president to go to jail, as he starts a five-year sentence for conspiring to fund his election campaign with money from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Not since World War Two Nazi collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain was jailed for treason in 1945 has any French ex-leader gone behind bars.

[…]

Ever since he left office in 2012, Sarkozy has been dogged by criminal inquiries and for months had to wear an electronic tag around his ankle after a conviction last December for trying to bribe a magistrate for confidential information about a separate case.

Late next month, France’s highest administrative court will give its verdict on Sarkozy’s appeal against a six-month jail term in another illegal campaign financing case known as the Bygmalion affair.

[…]

Sarkozy has always denied doing anything wrong in a case involving allegations that his 2007 presidential campaign was funded by millions of euros in Libyan cash.

The former centre-right leader was cleared of personally receiving the money but convicted of criminal association with two close aides, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, for their role in secret campaign financing from the Libyans.

The two men both had talks with Gaddafi’s intelligence chief and brother-in-law in 2005, a meeting arranged by a Franco-Lebanese intermediary called Ziad Tiakeddine, who died in Lebanon shortly before Sarkozy’s conviction.

As he lodged an appeal, Sarkozy is still considered innocent but he has been told he must go to jail in view of the “exceptional seriousness of the facts”.

The Economist (“France puts a former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, behind bars“) notes:

The fact that a former president, in office from 2007 to 2012, will serve time at all, let alone while still on appeal, has shaken France—and divided it.

[…]

It is quite a turnaround from the days when French politicians were seen as the beneficiaries of a culture of impunity. In the past criminal cases against politicians often failed to reach court, or were dropped because of the statute-of-limitations rule. Despite years of trying to prosecute Jacques Chirac, a former president who died in 2019, for his time as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995, investigating judges managed to take only one case against him to court. That trial in some ways marked a new era. Chirac became the first former president under the Fifth Republic to be tried in court, in a case over “fake jobs” at the Paris town hall. In 2011 he was found guilty and given a suspended sentence.

Since then a steady procession of politicians has filed in and out of the courtroom. In 2019 Jérôme Cahuzac, a former Socialist minister, was allowed to wear an electronic tag instead of serving time in prison for fiscal fraud. A year later a court sentenced François Fillon, a former centre-right prime minister under Mr Sarkozy, to five years in prison for embezzlement; the sentence was reduced on appeal to four years, suspended. Mr Sarkozy himself has this year worn an electronic tag for a conviction for corruption and influence-peddling in a separate case. A number of politicians (Patrick Balkany, Georges Tron, Claude Guéant) have also served time behind bars.

By the standards of other Western democracies, Mr Sarkozy’s incarceration stands out for the severity of the ruling in his case; collaborators apart, no western European president or prime minister has ever been to jail in post-war times. But it also fits a pattern under which politicians in France are increasingly being held to account by the judiciary. The country, it seems, no longer tolerates the practices to which it once turned a blind eye.

The French President is, by institutional design, inordinately powerful by democratic standards. He’s much more powerful constitutionally than an American President or Westminster-style prime ministers. As a Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder puts it,

They not only command the executive apparatus, including the armed forces, but tend to drive the national policymaking agenda with little parliamentary oversight. What’s more, as head of state, the president is a powerful symbol of the French nation. Before presidential terms were cut from seven years to five in 2000, some political analysts likened the French presidency to the absolute monarchy of the ancien régime.

And, yet, curiously, they can be held accountable for violating the law. Something to ponder.