Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy in connection with illicit Libyan financing of his 2007 campaign, was incarcerated at Paris’s La Santé prison on Tuesday, Mediapart reported.
President Emmanuel Macron and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin moved quickly to show support for the disgraced former leader, while corporate heavyweights such as Accor and Lagardère extended discreet backing.
French television networks, meanwhile, largely downplayed the gravity of the scandal, exposing the unease of a political and business elite scrambling to preserve privileges increasingly threatened by judicial scrutiny.
Sarkozy, who had long insisted that he should be treated “neither better nor worse than any citizen,” now confronts the reality of his third conviction.
The Paris judicial tribunal’s ruling last Thursday on the 2007 campaign’s illicit Libyan funds brought a decade-long saga to a close, with immediate detention ordered despite pending appeals.
The incarceration underscores the contradictions of France’s justice system: a former head of state now shares the overcrowded cells of an institution he once criticized.
As Sarkozy begins his term in isolation, the questions extend beyond his personal downfall: will this serve as a deterrent to future corruption or fuel accusations of judicial overreach?
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