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Nicolas Sarkozy will begin a five-year sentence for criminal conspiracy in a campaign financing scandal on Tuesday, while launching an appeal over his conviction.
Sarkozy, 70, will become the first former French president to serve time in jail, in a case that has sparked shockwaves in France owing to judges’ unusual decision to jail him before all appeals had been exhausted.
The case centres on accusations Sarkozy and two aides took millions from late Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi to fund his 2007 presidential campaign. Judges cleared the rightwing politician of several more serious charges of embezzlement and illegal campaign financing.
He will now spend time in Paris’ historic La Santé prison, isolated from other inmates for his own security. La Santé is famed for housing late Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Société Générale rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel and even, for a brief stint, poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
The case has cast a spotlight on Sarkozy’s outsize influence on French politics even after his presidency ended in 2012. Current justice minister Gérald Darmanin, who had previously worked for Sarkozy, said this week he was “saddened” by his plight “on a human level”.
President Emmanuel Macron received Sarkozy last week before his incarceration, the Élysée Palace said, without saying what was discussed.
“I’ve been very clear in public about the independence of judicial authorities . . . but it was normal that on a human level I should receive one of my predecessors in this context,” Macron told reporters on Monday in Slovenia.
Sarkozy called the verdict a “violation of the rule of law” in a series of newspaper interviews before his incarceration.
After the ruling was read out in September, a pale Sarkozy, flanked by his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, decried it as “scandalous” and said he was the victim of a hate campaign. The verdict includes a €100,000 fine.
“I’m being condemned on a hypothesis,” Sarkozy told La Tribune last Sunday, decrying the criminal conspiracy charge and underscoring that judges had not been able to prove any personal enrichment in the case.
Sarkozy’s outcry over the terms of his conviction has caused a stir and alarmed some constitutionalists. The judge who pronounced the verdict received death threats in late September, prompting concerns from magistrates’ unions.
“The rule of law is the foundation of our democracy,” Macron said on X at the time, calling the threats inadmissible.
Other politicians have also seized on the case, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen. She is under an immediate five-year ban on running for office, pending her appeal, after her conviction earlier this year for embezzling EU funds. She called the “generalisation” of moves to immediate apply sanctions, like in Sarkozy’s case, a “great danger”.
Sarkozy has been convicted for other offences, including in a separate illegal financing case, and been subject to travel restrictions and made to wear an electronic bracelet as a result.
The former president has told friends “the end of the story has not been written” in the Libyan affair, including at a goodbye event in Paris in early October, his former communications adviser Franck Louvrier said. Some 150 former work colleagues, relatives and even current culture minister Rachida Dati attended.
Sarkozy was ”very resilient and combative,” Louvrier said. ”He’s in campaign mode to show his innocence”.
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