What does Sarkozy’s condemnation mean for the French right?
The French republican right staggers after Sarkozy's second conviction. Enrico Martial's point
The former president of the French republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, suffers a second sentence in the first instance, to one year without parole, in the Bygmalion case on the financing of the campaign for the presidential elections of 2012, later won by François Hollande. On June 17, the prosecution had already asked for a year, but six months were on probation. Sarkozy's lawyer announced an appeal.
It is the second first degree conviction for this year, again with an appeal pending: on 1 March the Paris court had imposed on him three years, two of which with conditionality and one to be executed, for trafficking in influences and corruption, in the case of “listening”, that is, of wiretapping. In 2014, Sarkozy allegedly tried to recover his agendas – then seized in the investigation into the Bettencourt case, then ended up with a non-place to proceed – with the help of his lawyer and friend Thierry Herzog and a magistrate, Gilbert Azibert to whom he would have promised a prestigious post in the Principality of Monaco. They too were sentenced in the first instance to three years, two of which with probation. However, the diaries remained confiscated and the place in Munich was not obtained.
The Bygmalion case, from the name of the company that organized the electoral meetings, had emerged from journalistic inquiries and from the admissions of some protagonists, showing that the 2012 presidential campaign had largely exceeded the maximum ceiling of 22.5 million euros set by the law to obtain refunds. It turned out that one of the 44 meetings, that of Villepinte on 11 March 2012, with thousands of supporters, alone cost almost 6 million euros. Inflated or false invoices for about 16.2 million euros emerged, the prosecutor had recovered a usb key with the accounts, and then reconstructed what happened in the classroom. To the accounting data, to the e-mail messages between the collaborators and the admissions of at least some of them, was added the clash between François Copé, who had then been secretary of the UMP (later to become Les Républicains) and Nicolas Sakozy. In order to involve him, the then president of the republic in office had drawn from Copé's staff an important part of the personnel in charge of his campaign.
The sentences have also arrived for them: they are thirteen people, with sentences ranging from two to three years, of which a part is conditionally, from one to two years, also on the subject of false invoicing, which, however, have not been attributed to Sarkozy . For him, the sentence concerns in particular his "awareness" and his "will" to overcome the electoral spending ceiling. President Sarkozy " was aware of the spending ceiling set by the law, it was not his first electoral campaign and he had been warned of the risk of it being exceeded ".
The deputy head of the campaign, Jérôme Lavrilleux, sentenced to three years, one of which with a suspended sentence, in 2014, to BFM TV, had admitted the facts that were emerging in the journalistic inquiries and had publicly assumed his responsibilities. In the sentence, one of the main themes is precisely that of responsibility: to the other convicts, who had declared that they did not know or denied that they had been decisive in the decision and in the procedure, the court recalled their function at that time and their degree of responsibility linked to their awareness. It is a decisive change from the time when Roland Dumas, as President of the Constitutional Court, reviewed and justified the accounts of the then President Jacques Chirac and his competitor Edouard Balladur, which had also exceeded the spending ceiling admitted by the law to obtain reimbursements during the 1995 presidential campaign.
The sentence was greeted by Les Républicains with messages of solidarity and friendship to Nicolas Sarkozy. On the left there have been prudent readings ("it is a decision of justice, and I respect it," said the socialist president of the Occitania Region, Carole Delga) or of explicit appreciation among greens and ecologists.
Certainly, this second sentence weakens Les Républicains even more, for which the chances of accessing the second round of the presidential elections are further reduced. So, given that even Marine Le Pen is not doing well in the public image, the staff of President Macron began to attack Eric Zemmour, the polemicist located even further to the right of the Front National. He could become the challenger in the second round of the presidential elections of 2022.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/sarkozy-seconda-condanna/ on Fri, 01 Oct 2021 05:53:48 +0000.