The imprisonment of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a sobering lesson for those who discriminate against ethnic minorities

Watching Nicolas Sarkozy out on the streets of riot-hit French housing estates was always a troubling experience, particularly for those of us who grew up on one. 

In his heyday as Interior Minister, in the autumn of 2005, there was a period of intensive disturbances, and the diminutive conservative who went on to become President of France insisted on touring the worst hit tower blocks.

He was always surrounded by giant paramilitary police as he strutted around graffitied walkways, pledging “real change”, which meant locking up more young offenders, many of them the products of upbringings characterised by underfunding and inequality. 

“They’re thugs, scum, I’ll carry on, because I’m committed,” said Sarkozy, shortly after suggesting delinquents should be “blown away with a power hose”.

Dark-skinned members of ethnic minorities – people just like me were inevitably portrayed as the worst threats to society, and Sarkozy considered a long period of custody to be the best way of dealing with them. Hence so many of my male contemporaries regularly exchanging the grey concrete walls of a squalid cité estate for an almost identical prison building a few miles away. 

Two decades on, it is Sarkozy’s turn to lose his liberty inside his own cramped cell, following a conviction for conspiring to accept millions in laundered cash from the late Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. 

It was Sarkozy’s third offence – he was previously found guilty of trying to bribe a judge and illegal campaign funding – so even an appeal has not suspended his five year sentence.

Beyond the hubristic drama of seeing a reactionary conservative inside La Santé, the toughest prison in Paris, at the age of 70, there is also an important political lesson in Sarkozy’s incarceration. It is that the preening rabble-rousers can no longer rely on a corrupt establishment and a compliant media to avoid justice completely. 

The fraud squad raided Sarkozy’s Paris home on the day just after he lost his presidential immunity from prosecution in May 2012, and he made every effort afterwards to cover up his crimes. 

His first conviction – for offering a judge a comfortable retirement package for information into allegations that Sarkozy accepted multi-millions in laundered cash from Liliane Bettencourt, the late l’Oréal heiress – was not until 2020. 

As the enquiries and court appearances multiplied, Sarkozy was still largely projected as a distinguished statesman under attack from ideological enemies, including politically motivated judges. This had much to do with his close friendship with the media baron Vincent Bolloré, who provided Sarkozy with a yacht to celebrate his 2007 presidential win.

The so-called “Bollorisation” of French society has seen the media becoming as populist and authoritarian as Sarkozy’s discourse. Bolloré’s billions fund numerous outlets, from the 24-hour TV news channel CNews, through Europe 1 radio, and iconic print titles such as Paris Match and Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s only weighty Sunday newspaper.

These are the kind of outlets that helped make Marine Le Pen’s party, the far-Right National Rally and currently Bolloré’s favourite, become mainstream, despite its racist, Holocaust-denying roots.  They are now the largest party in the National Assembly, and Le Pen has been runner-up in the last two presidential elections.

Mediapart, the independent investigative site has produced an entire dossier on “Bolloré’s cultural crusade”, while also uncovering much of the damning evidence that finally saw Sarkozy become the first French head of state imprisoned since wartime collaborator Philippe Pétain.

Tellingly, many remain convinced that the evidence against Sarkozy was trumped up, but this was by no means the case. The investigation took more than ten years, extends to thousands of pages, and shows, for example, how Sarkozy’s entourage offered to overturn an international arrest warrant for Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Senussi, who was found guilty in absentia of blowing up a French passenger jet, murdering 170 people. 

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In short, a pardon for terrorism was on offer in return for Gaddafi providing millions in laundered cash to help get Sarkozy elected. Relatives of those slaughtered on the UTA plane that exploded over Niger in 1989 are naturally among those calling for even tougher sanctions against Sarkozy. 

While they welcome his incarceration, they are – like many others – concerned that Sarkozy spent a full five years as head of state, without any law and order official being able to challenge him. This was despite Sarkozy inviting Gaddafi to a lavish state visit to Paris in 2007. The hugely controversial honour was an obvious quid pro quo for criminal activity, but nobody could say so at the time. 

There are plenty of critics who think that Sarkozy should also have been arrested exactly two decades ago, following the deaths of two teenagers in an electricity substation at Clichy-sous-Bois, in the Paris suburbs. It was on 27th October 2005, that Zyed Benna, 17, and from a Tunisian background, and Bouna Traoré, 15, and from a family originally from Mali, were running away from a police identity check when they were electrocuted. A third youth, Muhittin Altun, 17, and of Tunisian origin, suffered horrific burns, as Sarkozy’s oppressive policing was blamed for the tragedies. An enquiry cleared the victims of any wrongdoing, and they became symbols of the harassment and violence suffered by those from minority Arab and Muslim backgrounds. 

The rioting was so bad afterwards, that a state of emergency was declared, and thousands were arrested, and immediately imprisoned. Sarkozy himself came up with the soundbite, “If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t run when you see the police.” 

Such callous language set the tone for even tougher policing, as Sarkozy earned the nickname “Le Top Cop”. More lethal incidents followed, throughout the Sarkozy presidency, and well beyond. In June 2023, Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old from an Algerian-Moroccan background, was shot dead at point-blank range by a traffic officer in Nanterre, another northern Paris suburb. Civil disturbances followed, especially on the estates. 

The policeman who pulled the trigger in the Merzouk case is currently on remand, awaiting his murder trial, and, in an increasingly divided country, earning plenty of admirers too. Le Pen has got behind him, as have plenty of members of Sarkozy’s party, the Republicans. They still argue that armed officers should always be given the benefit of the doubt when dealing with youngsters still viewed as immigrants, because of their family origins. 

Sarkozy’s prime minister, François Fillon, also wanted to enjoy presidential immunity from prosecution after being indicted for stealing taxpayers’ funds, by pretending that his wife was his parliamentary assistant. Before receiving a suspended prison sentence for fraud, Fillon actually stood to become head of state while being investigated. Despite losing the 2012 presidential race, millions of conservatives voted for him.

Even now, both Fillon and Sarkozy see themselves as wronged heroes – ones who had so much to offer their country, but who were ultimately betrayed. On the day Sarkozy was imprisoned, I watched his propagandists set up a woefully choreographed denouement, which included Sarko hobbling along beside his much taller third wife, the former supermodel Carla Bruni, before kissing her goodbye. Sarkozy said his main prison reading would be The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel about false imprisonment and the fight for vengeance. 

What hardly any of the Bolloré media mentioned was that Bruni-Sarkozy herself is now an indicted criminal suspect, and facing prison time of her own for trying to hide evidence and fraudulently cover up her husband’s dealings with a Gaddafi middleman in a so-called “Save Sarko” operation. Like her husband, Bruni-Sarkozy denies any wrongdoing, and continues to view investigators, whether judicial or media, as lowlife “Pinocchios”.

Such melodramatic cynicism can certainly be attributed to the Donald Trump-style mindset that is becoming prevalent in an ever-changing France. Now there is the possibility of Le Pen standing for the presidency for the fourth time, having herself been found guilty earlier this year of embezzling money from the European Parliament. 

Unlike Sarkozy, Le Pen has been bailed while appealing her four-year prison sentence, and is hoping that she can still replace President Emmanuel Macron in 2027, when he is obliged to stand down after serving the maximum two terms allowed. If Le Pen does make it to the Élysée Palace, the thoroughly outdated Fifth Republic Constitution will even allow her to pardon herself.

It was in August 1789, at the height of the French Revolution, that the Constituent Assembly voted to abolish all privileges. This was intended to move society away from the chronic injustices enforced by royalty and their lackeys under the Ancien Régime. The Sarkozy saga shows that France is a long way from finally living up to the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity myth enshrined in its national motto, but also that more radical constitutional change is in order. It cannot come soon enough. 

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