Former president Nicolas Sarkozy was at the pinnacle of French politics for just five years, but left a long and lurid trail of corruption allegations behind him.
Eight years after retiring from politics, the man known as the “hyper-president” remains influential, a trusted adviser to Emmanuel Macron, who turned to the fiery right-winger when his centrist liberalism wilted under attack from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. “The right haven’t found anyone to replace him,” was how one insider put it.
Yet this pillar of the French state has begun a five-year jail sentence for his role in a conspiracy to illegally raise campaign funds from Libya. On Tuesday morning, he swapped the comfort of his Paris home – where he lives with his third wife, model and singer-songwriter Carla Bruni-Sarkozy – for a prison cell.
In a separate case he was accused of a vast overspend in his unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign. But these and other scandals are dwarfed by the Libyan campaign-finance saga: the charge that he sealed a corruption pact with the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to obtain millions of euros in cash for his 2007 presidential campaign.
Sarkozy was cleared of all other charges in the case, including corruption.
“The story is so crazy and complicated that it was hard to believe,” a French journalist who has followed the case told The Independent. “It’s a very serious case; there has been nothing else like this.”
Gaddafi had for years been an international pariah for sponsoring terrorist attacks, including the downing of a French DC-10 in Niger in 1989 with the loss of all 170 souls on board, 40 of whom were French. But after the September 11 attacks, the Libyan strongman made a sustained bid for international respectability.
And it came to pass. In 2007, two months into Sarkozy’s presidency, Gaddafi pitched his tent in the garden of the Elysee palace, snarling the Paris traffic with his 100 limousines and enraging many French citizens. To the many French voters appalled by the invitation, Sarkozy explained it as a gesture in recognition of Gaddafi having agreed to free a group of Bulgarian nurses jailed in Libya on trumped-up charges. The Parisian court was told, however, that the truth was almost unbelievably squalid – and reckless.
How was a politician of matchless ambition to gain an edge on his rivals when election campaign donations were rigidly controlled? Sarkozy’s answer, prosecutors claimed, was to obtain massive funding from a source that no one would suspect.
“Behind the public image, investigations reveal a man driven by overwhelming personal ambition, ready to sacrifice integrity, honesty and rectitude on the altar of power,” prosecutors said.
Sarkozy is the son of an aristocratic Hungarian refugee, and his mother was from a mixed Catholic and Sephardic Jewish background. He had none of the classical education of the French political elite. He was educated modestly, and qualified as a barrister. But from his teens he was driven by fierce political ambition, unhindered by either his outsider background or the short stature that caused him to be written off as “little Sarkozy”.
A charismatic showman, Sarkozy was the first French politician to master television. An early step on the ladder was becoming mayor of the prosperous Parisian suburb of Neuilly, a post in which he gained the patronage of the prime minister at the time, Jacques Chirac.
He showed his ruthless instincts when he turned on Chirac, backing a rival for the presidency in 2002; when that gambit failed, he returned to Neuilly – and stunned the nation in 1993 by becoming the hero of a real-life hostage drama, in which 21 Neuilly infants were held by a terrorist in their kindergarten.
Brushing the professional negotiators aside, he strode into the school, negotiated directly with the perpetrator, and brought the unharmed children out in his arms one by one. He never looked back.
