Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose trial for alleged Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign opens on Monday, is a political bulimic who recently used all his influence to try to prevent his rival François Bayrou to join Matignon.
KEYSTONE
Although definitively sentenced in mid-December to a year under bracelet in the wiretapping affair, he is still considered by part of the right as a reference and increases the number of meetings in his offices where he receives a stone’s throw from the Elysée, in the Parisian district of Miromesnil.
The tempo of the ballet of friends and courtiers even accelerated in the last weeks before and after the censorship of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, from the same political family as him.
Displaying a cordial understanding with Emmanuel Macron whom he meets regularly, while deploring that he “does not always listen to him”, he went to the Elysée on Sunday December 8 at nightfall to say everything there. badly he thought of François Bayrou.
“He hates him, it’s skin deep,” says an LR official who, like other elected officials of the party, recently met the former boss of the right, attributing his attempts to torpedo François Bayrou to his choice to support the socialist François Hollande against him in 2012.
His influence on his party was confirmed in September when he called on his people to join the executive in an interview with Le Figaro, encouraging them to renounce the “legislative pact” that they defended to join the executive of Michel Barnier .
Judicial setbacks
In front of the courts, he has a series of setbacks. On December 18, he became the first former president to be sentenced to prison – in this case under an electronic bracelet – his mentor Jacques Chirac having been given a two-year suspended prison sentence in 2011 in the fictitious jobs case. of the City of Paris.
The decision of the Court of Cassation was rendered two weeks before the opening of the trial into suspicions of Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, which is being held from January 6 to April 10 at the Paris court, after a decade of investigations.
“I have been used to suffering this harassment for ten years,” repeats the ex-president who celebrates his 70th birthday in January.
After his defeat in 2012, the man the French nicknamed “Sarko” swore that “we would never hear from him again”.
But his legal troubles as much as his media life, sometimes alongside his wife, the ex-French-Italian model and singer Carla Bruni, have made this prediction lie.
Eternal tutelary figure of the right, although contested by some of its figures, its evocation in the meetings of its party Les Républicains continues to trigger thunderous applause, just as its souvenir books remain publishing successes.
“Little Frenchman of mixed blood”
The man who likes to define himself as a “little Frenchman of mixed blood” – Hungarian father, Greek Jewish maternal grandfather – was only 28 years old when he won the town hall of Neuilly in 1983, located in the extension of the beautiful districts of western Paris.
Endowed with infectious enthusiasm, verbal ardor linked to unbridled gestures, Nicolas Sarkozy had the gift of making himself loved as much as hated, sometimes by the same people, throughout a political career of forty years in the National Assembly, in several ministries or in the presidency of the UMP, the former name of LR.
Once excluded from the game on the right, he once again became essential during Jacques Chirac’s re-election campaign in the 2002 presidential election, before challenging the latter from the ranks of the government, as very popular Minister of the Interior, and open the doors of the Élysée in 2007.
“Bling-bling president” for some, skillful manager of the 2008 financial crisis for others, he was the first president since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981) to be defeated while seeking a second term in 2012.
But the fratricidal struggles on the right open the way to a first return.
From 2013, a “Sarkothon” raised 11 million euros to compensate for the invalidation of his campaign accounts by the Constitutional Council.
“I have a special bond with the French. It can stretch, it can tighten, but it exists,” he said in 2013.
Sin of pride? In 2017, he was excluded from a new race for the Élysée by a vote of his party activists, who preferred his former Prime Minister François Fillon.
cg-pab/arz/asl/swi
