This fall, France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was briefly imprisoned in a criminal case involving alleged corruption and illegal campaign financing by Muammar Gaddafi. Sarkozy’s three weeks in a Paris jail were a major political event — the first instance of a French head of state being imprisoned since the collaborationist Marshal Philippe Pétain’s conviction after World War II.
Now Sarkozy has written a book about the experience. He used the moment not just to talk about prison life but to declare an end to the cordon sanitaire that has informally proscribed mainstream parties from allying with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). If conservatives long pledged opposition to this party’s fascist heritage and politics, they are now weakening this stance.
“When the time comes, I’ll take a public position on the subject,” Sarkozy writes in Le journal d’un prisonnier (Prisoner’s Journal), calling for an end to the “artificial” cordon and emphasizing that the RN is not a danger to the Republic.
After Sarkozy’s conviction and imprisonment, right-wingers of all flavors jumped to the former president’s defense. They insisted that the prosecution was the fruit of a leftist witch hunt against Sarkozy, who remains a potent symbol of the mid-2000s counterrevolution led by a muscular French conservatism.
“That a former president, who has appealed his conviction, finds himself subject to a deferred detention order which is being executed [in advance], as normally used in cases of possible recidivism or threat to public order, appears to me to correspond to a desire to humiliate the former president,” the RN’s party president, Jordan Bardella, commented.
On general grounds, Sarkozy may have had a fair case against being imprisoned before his appeal. A court ultimately accepted his argument that he could be expected not to flee the country or intimidate witnesses. Yet many of those bewailing Sarkozy’s ill-treatment are also…
Auteur: Marlon Ettinger
