On Monday, a French court handed down a sentence perhaps more appropriate for those who were in March than for March 1. The court declared that former President Nicolas Sarkozy was guilty of corruption and influence peddling and sentenced him to three years in custody, although he only has to serve one, and even that is unlikely to happen for years, if ever. The decision was attacked by supporters of the right as a political assassination and applauded by critics of the left as the fair response of the republic.
However, the most notable parallels are not with the former Roman republic, but with the present American republic. The causes of Sarkozy’s rise and fall, as well as the political and judicial consequences that followed, anticipate the recent career of an American president who ignored the public good for private purposes and hoped to be served by the republic instead of serving him.
When Sarkozy defeated the socialist Ségolène Royal in the 2007 presidential election, the country was galvanized. Rather than marking yet another transfer of power between France’s traditional left and right, Sarkozy’s victory seemed to mark a rupture. Sarkozy was something genuinely new in French politics.
Unlike almost all of its conservative and socialist predecessors, who were products of the nation great schools—The parallel system of higher education that trains the country’s political and intellectual, financial, and industrial elites – Sarkozy ended up in law school. But it hardly mattered. Ambitious and arrogant, Sarkozy paved the way for the world of finance and industry, and then for the world of conservative politics. During the 1980s and 1990s, he quickly ascended the hierarchy of the movement and served in a number of ministerial positions. The most important, by far, was as Minister of the Interior, where he drew the attention of the world with the outbreak of riots in the disgruntled and decadent suburbs of the country in 2005. He promised to free these neighborhoods from racaille, or rabble, using a Kärcher – a brand of energy washer – if necessary.
His language did little to contain the turmoil, but much to move the conservative bases. Sarkozy followed this populist line during his campaign for the presidency, which he ran as a self-proclaimed outsider and curse of the politically correct. In that spirit, he announced his intention to restrict immigration and create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. The fact that Sarkozy associated this identity with the “Gauls” – a mythical construction that previous French governments adopted to provide the nation with a sense of collective identity – was no more a problem in the eyes of his supporters than his failure to institute a national census. based on ethnic origin. Sarkozy’s political failures weighed little against his rhetorical successes. Sarkozy’s ethnic dog whistles brought together the millions of French people at his side for whom demographic and economic changes made them feel that they were no longer at home in France.
Along with his rudimentary type of populism, Sarkozy also threw himself into “populism”. The French phrase for celebrity culture people entered the Elysée with Sarkozy. Nicknamed President Bling-Bling, Sarkozy with sunglasses and jewelry was having fun in the company of stars, ranging from his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni, to the iconic rocker Johnny Hallyday. As for le peuple who elected him to the Elysée, Sarkozy bet that his rhetorical excesses would satisfy them. However, at the end of his frantic five-year term, fraught with failed efforts in institutional and constitutional reforms, Sarkozy was defeated by the mild socialist François Hollande, who expressively ran as “Monsieur Normal”.
Replace the former US president with Sarkozy and the current one with Hollande, and this summary looks like a French prequel to our own 2020 presidential election. As if to emphasize the parallels, Sarkozy’s post-presidential life wavered from a courtroom. to the other. This week’s case is just one of a dozen in which Sarkozy has been bogged down since moving out of the Elysée in 2012. Grift and greed are at the heart of most of these issues, and while some have been shelved and others do not directly imply Sarkozy, at least four cases are still under judicial scrutiny. More worrying is the investigation into whether the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi channeled large sums of money into Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.
As with the Republican Party, which, instead of breaking with Trump in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, joined him, also with Les Républicains, the conservative party created by Sarkozy. The party’s bases are still linked to Sarkozy, while the leadership bet on Sarkozy’s candidacy for next year’s presidential elections. In fact, without another candidate capable of seriously challenging the two favorites – President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen – Les Républicains does not have a plan B if Sarkozy does not run. This partly explains the declarations of loyalty made by the current party leaders, who denounced the “judicial implacability” and the “revenge” behind these accusations.
Here, too, Sarkozy shares a characteristic with his American analog. Although he did his best to divide the country during his term, he at least managed to unite his own party as long as it remained in the public eye.
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