The recent conviction of 70-year old former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012), for criminal conspiracy and “corruption at the highest level”, marked the final humiliation of a rabidly right-wing, deeply prejudiced figure who perfectly symbolises the growing xenophobic strain of mainstream European politics.

This marked the destruction of the legacy of a populist politician who thrived on a dog whistle politics of hatred towards France’s Maghrebi and black migrants, and particularly its Muslim inhabitants.

Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in prison and fined €100,000 for soliciting funds (through his aides) from Libyan autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi, for his 2007 presidential campaign. He visited Qaddafi in Tripoli while interior minister in 2005, before inviting him for a presidential state visit two years later.

Sarkozy reacted to the verdict with self-pitying victimhood, describing the case as politically motivated and the ruling as a “scandal”. Acting like a naked Bonapartist emperor, he sought to equate himself with the French state in shamelessly noting: “those they have humiliated are France and its image.” Sarkozy thus displayed no sense of remorse, nor took any responsibility for his criminal actions.

A Faustian pact?
This was a murky tale full of colourful characters that again exposed a six-decade system of corrupt cronyism dubbed Françafrique, in which some French political parties illicitly obtained political campaign funds – that should have gone towards meeting urgent development needs – from African dictators, in exchange for protecting these autocrats. The investigation of Sarkozy began in 2013, two years after Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam (and a Libyan news agency), accused Sarkozy of taking millions of dollars from his father to finance his presidential campaign.

In 2012, shady Lebanese-French businessman, Ziad Takieddine – who fled France to  Lebanon in 2020 to escape prosecution in another corruption case –  claimed, in 2016, that he had handed €5 million in cash to Sarkozy, and had proof of €50 million 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.

Although 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 Qaddafi through bank and cash transfers, offshore accounts, and shady transactions, in exchange for rehabilitating the Libyan dictator’s image in the West and winning lucrative economic deals, once Sarkozy became president. Seven other defendants were found guilty, including two of Sarkozy’s former ministerial aides: Claude Guéant (corruption) and Brice Hortefeux (criminal conspiracy).

To make matters worse, Sarkozy’s Italian-born supermodel-singer wife, Carla Bruni, was also charged last year with concealing evidence linked to the Qaddafi case. Sarkozy would repay Qaddafi 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.

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 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 from L’Oreal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt. Sarkozy was subsequently convicted in the “Bygmalion” case 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 hate-peddling politician
In campaigning to be elected as the Right’s flagbearer in 2017 (which he humiliatingly lost), Sarkozy again donned the garments of the xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen’s then National Front. In Islamophobic tones, he advocated adopting draconian policies such as:  declaring war on “multiculturalism”; radically cutting immigration; imposing a 10-year wait for non-nationals to apply for citizenship; suspending the right of close family to join legal immigrants; and denying citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born in France.

These ideas have now become popular in mainstream European politics. Sarkozy further advocated a ban on head-scarves in state universities (one already existed in state schools), and prohibiting pork-free options in school canteens.

He was a ruthless jingoist and egomaniac, often derided as “president bling-bling”: an arriviste who accepted free holidays from the rich and famous. His notoriously uncouth behaviour included challenging a fisherman to a brawl after being booed by a crowd. He was ridiculed as “Zorro” for a hyperactive style. Sarkozy’s ascent to the presidency in 2007 saw the rise to power of a right-wing interior minister who had increased police harassment of immigrants.

In 2005, he had infamously dismissed alienated and marginalised protesting Maghrebi and black African youth in Paris’s hopeless, impoverished suburbs as racaille (scum) who needed to be cleaned up with a hose-pipe. This was after two immigrant African youths playing football – whom Sarkozy accused of criminal intent – were electrocuted after being chased by French police.

Acerbic and deeply prejudiced, Sarkozy made a notoriously racist speech in Dakar in July 2007, noting that colonial France might have made “mistakes”, but believed in its “civilising mission . . . and did not exploit anybody.” He then incredibly noted: “Africans have never really entered history…. In a world where nature controls everything, man has remained immobile in the middle of an unshakable order where everything is determined. There is no room either for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress.”

Sarkozy also strongly backed African autocrats: Chad’s Idriss Déby, Central African Republic’s François Bozizé, and Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadéma. Patrice Evra, the Senegal-born captain of the French football team (which consisted mostly of black players), described how Sarkozy’s aides had visited the team before the French president arrived for a photo with them. The aides reportedly requested placing the few white players next to the president.

A  cosy, corrupt political elite
The fact that a figure as discredited as Sarkozy continues to be defended and courted by right-wing politicians like the Islamophobic former interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, underlines the distorted values of a sleaze-ridden French elite that has often condoned impunity and assumed it was above the law. Marine Le Pen, leader of the rebranded National Rally was barred from holding public office for five years in March after her party was found to have embezzled €2.9 million of European Union parliamentary funds through a fake job 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 was the same prison that, in 2019, held his one-time friend, Patrick Balkany, the former right-wing mayor convicted of tax fraud. Like Balkany, Sarkozy will have an individual cell, and allowed one hour’s exercise and three visits a week.
Professor Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.