[ Editorial ] Sarkozy, the Real Scandal
Former french président Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction and imprisonment aren’t the true outrage. The real scandal lies with those who committed similar deeds and still walk free, untouched by justice.
No one should gloat over a man’s conviction. Justice exists to punish the guilty while protecting them from the wrath of the mob.
The scandal that landed former French president Nicolas Sarkozy a five-year prison term revolved around accusations that Muammar Gaddafi funneled €50 million into his 2007 presidential bid. Just four years on, Sarkozy spearheaded NATO airstrikes, toppling the very dictator who had allegedly bankrolled his rise to power.
We won’t mourn Nicolas Sarkozy’s fate—a greedy, brash, corrupt figure who stumbled into the shadowy networks inherited from Charles Pasqua, a cunning former right-wing broker , for all his flaws, dreamed solely of France’s grandeur. Sarkozy, like too many of his generation and beyond, cared only for himself. Let’s not forget: he dragged France back into NATO’s unified command and pushed through the treacherous Lisbon Treaty whose content the French voted down 3 years before—exactly the moves his backers handpicked him to make.
He is the one who spearheaded NTO’s illegal regime change operation in Lybia in 2011, throwing a large part of Africa into chaos and generating the mass migration crisis Europe is still struggling with.
Nicolas Sarkozy is a serial offender, tangled in multiple criminal cases. How many repeat criminals in France get to stroll into court unshackled while facing a potential decade behind bars?
Is French justice impartial? Far from it. Is it steeped in politics? Absolutely. The French justice system mirrors the corrosion inflicted on our institutions over the last half-century by those in power, Nicolas Sarkozy among them.
The role of the President of the Republic is primarily to ensure the proper functioning of institutions. Nicolas Sarkozy did nothing but bend them to serve his own petty interests, debasing the presidential office—a torch eagerly taken up by François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, who have only worsened the damage. He rendered the role of the Prime Minister, who alone, according to our Constitution, governs, obsolete by replacing it with the Secretary General of the Élysée, Claude Guéant, also sentenced to six years in jail for money laundering, influence peddling, corruption, and criminal conspiracy in the same case.
The stupidity, hypocrisy, and cowardice of the entire French political elite are laid bare for all to see. It wavers between an obsession with preserving privileges it has no claim to and a torrent of sanctimonious moralizing.
Take Mr. Bellamy, the rosy-cheeked choirboy MEP, who preaches sovereignty but votes for everything in the European Parliament. The court did not rule that there was no corruption, no embezzlement, or no illegal campaign financing as he claims. The court ruled that the prosecution failed to provide sufficient evidence to convict Nicolas Sarkozy of these charges. Fortunately, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the defense.
However, the court ruled that Nicolas Sarkozy was guilty of criminal conspiracy, backed by overwhelming evidence and sealed by his prior conviction in the “Paul Bismuth” wiretapping scandal, which ties directly to the Libyan affair. And let’s not overlook the witness tampering charge tied to Ziad Takieddine’s retraction - a prime witness in the libyan case - for which Sarkozy still faces prosecution.
Enter Patrick Klugman—socialist deputy to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, her personal attorney, and ex-head of the Union of Jewish Students of France—who brazenly declares that Nicolas Sarkozy was railroaded into conviction on zero evidence. Where is the bar association in all this? A lawyer with no stake in the trial has no business undermining a court ruling, especially one that’s not final.
Article 450-1 of the French criminal code:
A criminal conspiracy is constituted by any group formed or agreement established with a view to preparing, characterized by one or more material acts, one or more crimes or one or more offenses punishable by at least five years of imprisonment.
The charge of criminal conspiracy empowers elite law enforcement units—think anti-gang squads, counter-terrorism teams, drug enforcement, financial crime investigators, and human trafficking task forces—to catch bad guys before they strike or, if they’ve already done damage, to lock them away for years, keeping society safe.
Criminal conspiracy in France mirrors the “conspiracy” charge in U.S. criminal law, embodied in the notorious RICO Act. Every claim must be backed by hard evidence, or a conviction won’t hold. Nicolas Sarkozy never crossed paths with his co-defendents Ziad Takieddine and Claude Guéant, and Guéant never slipped off to Libya with the covert help of Takieddine and Djouhri—obviously!
Let’s turn to MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy, who—unless our memory fails—was part of Clara Gaymard’s inner circle at General Electric France during the explosive Alstom scandal, when she helmed the company’s French operations. He made a public fuss over a supposed “visit” to his apartment, yet to our knowledge, Tanguy has never stepped up to the prosecutor or the investigating magistrate handling the probe sparked by late MP Olivier Marleix’s damning report, offering up any of the insider details he claims to possess.
There is no need for a criminal conspiracy to come to fruition. The mere act of associating to prepare the commission of an offense punishable by at least five years of imprisonment constitutes, in itself, the criminal offense of criminal conspiracy.
Mr. Tanguy plays the penitent judge. On the grounds that, according to him, “tens of thousands of rapists, assailants, and other walking dangers” are not imprisoned, Nicolas Sarkozy should not be perfecting his tan in a VIP cell at La Santé prison. How do the unpunished crimes of some excuse those of others?
How dare he, a MP, write that Nicolas Sarkozy will go to prison in defiance of the presumption of innocence? Pretrial detention centers are full of people held in custody awaiting their trial or appeal, without this undermining their presumption of innocence in any way! The proof: if they are convicted, their pretrial detention is deducted from the sentence imposed.
Next up is MP Marine Le Pen, a lawyer by training. There’s no question, contrary to what she states, of undermining the right to a second trial. The immediate enforcement of Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year prison sentence doesn’t strip him of his right to appeal.
There’s no assault on the presumption of innocence. The immediate enforcement of Nicolas Sarkozy’s sentence is fully warranted by the “Paul Bismuth” wiretapping scandal and his attempt, through the notorious Mimi Marchand (a repeat felon who managed the Macron couple’s PR as rumors of Emmanuel Macron’s homosexuality emerged in late 2016), to bribe witness Ziad Takieddine—who conveniently died just two days before Sarkozy and his cronies were convicted. Marchand faces indictment for witness tampering, while Sarkozy is charged with complicity of the same felony as well as “ criminal conspiracy to orchestrate a fraudulent scheme to manipulate trial.” Another criminal conspiracy charge! Is it truly sensible to let a repeat offender, so eager to break the law again and again, walk free?
Ms. Le Pen frets over her own fate, with her appeal in her misappropriation of government funds slated for early 2026. She commits a grave sin of pride. She is indeed the victim of a provisional execution of the additional penalty of ineligibility, a provisional execution without basis and contrary to a decision of the Constitutional Council. In her case, the right to a second level of jurisdiction has been effectively nullified by a rogue tribunal invoking the notion of democratic public order, a concept nonexistent in French law. We have written it, and we stand by it.
Marine Le Pen’s situation couldn’t be more different from Nicolas Sarkozy’s. Her supposed “recidivism” for the added penalty of ineligibility would simply mean winning reelection—a clear sign that the ruling against her reeks of political motives.
Now, over to the left: the grand fakir himself, François Ruffin—Emmanuel Macron’s old chum from the posh Jesuit benches of Amiens’ Lycée La Providence—a silver-spoon socialist slumming it as a working-class hero.
Nicolas Sarkozy was not convicted of betraying France to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya—making such a claim is outright defamation. Marine Le Pen stops short of directly slamming the judiciary but voices worries, stumbling badly by insisting that Sarkozy’s right to a second trial was trampled.
Oh, François Ruffin, do jog your selective memory! Your pal Sophia Chikirou, left wing MP and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s better half, got nailed with an indictment for aggravated fraud—for allegedly pulling some fancy financial tricks during Mélenchon’s 2017 presidential campaign. And Mélenchon himself is still squirming under a judicial microscope for playing fast and loose with his European Parliament aides back in his MEP days. Where have we heard this tune before? Oh, right—Marine Le Pen’s in the same hot water.
Oh, François Ruffin, before you go scrambling up that coconut tree, check that your rear end isn’t a mess. Or, if you’re already leaking, at least have the courtesy to slap on some adult diapers to spare us the sight!
We could spend forever stitching bespoke shade for these politicos who can’t see past their next blabbering TV rant. Left, right, it’s all the same circus—each one smugly convinced they’re untouchable, hoarding their perks, and cackling with spite when a rival bites the dust in criminal court. Meanwhile, their own closets are stuffed with skeletons just as nasty.
The true outrage isn’t Nicolas Sarkozy’s conviction or his impending lockdown behind bars.
The true outrage? Thierry Solère, a former MP and French Politician undisputed champion of indictments with a staggering thirteen counts—spanning tax fraud, ghost jobs, siphoning public cash, peddling influence, and campaign funding fraud—has yet to face a courtroom since 2017. He roams free, unbowed, still whispering in Emmanuel Macron’s ear as his shadowy political guru.
The real scandal? The glacial pace of French justice in pursuing Emmanuel Macron’s ministers— a staggering 26 of them tangled in probes or scandals since 2017, many still skating free while the system snoozes.
The true abomination? The Alstom scandal, swept under the rug—a brazen betrayal of France’s vital interests—that handed Emmanuel Macron, as Economy Minister, a golden ticket to sprinkle favors across Paris’s elite playground, per Arnaud Montebourg’s, Macron’s predecessor at the Minsitry of Economy, fiery accusations: fattening the coffers of banks, corporate lawyers, high-flying consultants, and glossy PR sharks. And oh, how they returned the love, pouring cash into his 2017 presidential campaign.
The real travesty? A judicial coup d’état, masterminded by the lofty civil service elite and the robe-clad high magistrates, all to propel Emmanuel Macron into the Élysée Palace—because, let’s be honest, he wouldn’t have sniffed the second round of 2017 without their meddling. We’re all reaping the catastrophic fallout of that grand betrayal of our democracy.
The real disgrace? An indigent, broken justice system—a screaming insult to democracy—run by high ranking magistrates who couldn’t care less about actual justice. These bigwigs weren’t appointed to uphold fairness in the name of the French people or for society’s benefit. They’re there to guard the gilded interests of their cozy little class.
Every single French institution—every last one—has been poisoned, rotten to the core, not by the regular folks working within them, but by the same old self-serving elites perched at the top. Before this festering gangrene chokes the life out of the nation’s veins, it’s past time to start lopping off the diseased limbs and searing the wounds shut with a blazing iron.