Nicolas Sarkozy’s No Good, Very Bad Campaign Finance Scheme

The former president leaves office, but his legal troubles are just beginning. Years later, he gets charged in connection with a scheme to route foreign state-sponsored support to his inaugural presidential campaign. 

Sound familiar? It should. 

It’s the ongoing case of former President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The campaign was the presidential race in France—in 2007. It was shaping up to be a competitive one, and one candidate needed an infusion of campaign cash. The strategy? It wasn’t grassroots outreach. It wasn’t getting a loan from a bank, either. According to media reporting in France, Nicolas Sarkozy opted for a third option: under-the-table campaign contributions from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The scandal has dogged Sarkozy for eight years. And it recently produced a new charge, his fourth in this case.

On Oct. 16, French prosecutors charged Sarkozy with “criminal association” (“association des malfaiteurs,” roughly equivalent to a criminal conspiracy charge). The charges add to a constellation of legal woes for Sarkozy. He’s already in hot water with French prosecutors for other matters, in addition to other charges related to the Gadhafi debacle. But this new charge puts Sarkozy way deeper in the hole. The Washington Post described it as a “dramatic escalation” in the legal battle between prosecutors and Sarkozy. 

It’s a juicy story, if a bit confusing. The scandal involves a labyrinth of political operatives, secret bank accounts and—of course—two early modern Dutch paintings. It also involves the idiosyncrasies of French criminal procedure. 

So what’s really going on here? 

The first public allegation of the under-the-table contribution came from Gadhafi’s son in 2011. Saif al-Islam Gadhafi’s claim came just as Sarkozy’s relationship with the elder Gadhafi bottomed out. Six days before Euronews published the interview with Saif, France became the first country to officially recognize Libya’s opposition rebels—proving that politicians aren’t always beholden to their campaign contributors. Three days after the interview went live, French military planes whizzed over Libya and began firing on Gadhafi’s military vehicles. The younger Gadhafi talked about Sarkozy’s role in the intervention as if the French president had reneged on a contract: “Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign …. He was given assistance so that he could help them. But he’s disappointed us: give us back our money.” Some reporting at the time suggested that the regime saw the Euronews interview as payback for France’s role in the air campaign—a “senior Libyan official” told the Guardian that “Sarkozy is playing dirty, so we are playing dirty, too.”

But were Saif’s accusations just sour grapes? Or was there any merit to his explosive claims? 
Other French outlets picked up the story but cautioned that the allegation lacked any tangible factual basis. “What credit should be given to these serious accusations?” asked Le Monde. “The last time, despite threats about a supposed ‘grave secret,’ the [Gadhafi] family produced nothing concrete.” L’Express republished the allegation but then released a story the next day stressing that “no proof has been published, making verification impossible.” At the time, the allegations received a pretty flat reception in the English-language press. I couldn’t find a single story from the weeks after the allegations about the cash dump in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. The Guardian, while noting that “Libyan sources have separately told the Guardian substantial funds were paid into accounts to support Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in 2007,” cautioned that it “has been unable to confirm the Libyan claims independently.” 

But the subtext of the allegation tracked with popular anxieties about Sarkozy’s behavior toward Gadhafi during the early years of his presidency. Sarkozy played nice with Gadhafi in ways that made many in France queasy. During his first year in office, Sarkozy invited Gadhafi to Paris in what was the dictator’s first trip to France in 34 years. Sarkozy played the role of gracious host to his pariah guest: He allowed Gadhafi to “set up a Bedouin tent in the gardens of the official guest residence, the 19th-century Hotel Marigny, next to the presidential Elysee Palace.” The visit—which regrettably coincided with the annual Dec. 10 global human rights day—set off a torrent of criticism. Sarkozy’s own secretary of state for human rights, for example, told a news outlet that “Colonel [Gadhafi] must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet.” The $14.7 billion in French airplanes and defense equipment that Gadhafi agreedBecome a supporter of IT Security News and help us remove the ads.