At the Libyan appeal trial, Sarkozy’s final cry of rage

The voice trembles with emotion and anger: Nicolas Sarkozy closed the Libyan appeal trial on Wednesday with a cry of rage, assuring that he had “not betrayed the trust of the French” and calling on justice to exonerate him at the end of this “station of the cross”.

Before deliberating the decision on November 30, the president of the court Olivier Géron invites the former head of state one last time to the bar, to close the appeal trial of the alleged financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign by hidden funds paid by Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.

Very restrained during the two and a half months of hearing, the former lawyer, ex-champion of the right, who listened to his four counsel take turns asking for his release, releases his until then contained anger. As the words go by, the voice becomes harsh, the face angry.

“This affair of alleged Libyan financing of my campaign began with lies and conspiracy. It must end with truth and transparency,” begins Nicolas Sarkozy, 71 years old.

Designating him as the “instigator” of a corrupt pact, the general prosecutor’s office demanded seven years of imprisonment against him for criminal association, corruption and illegal financing of his campaign with embezzled Libyan public money.

“It’s not a historic trial, not a novel, it’s my life,” replies Nicolas Sarkozy. “I ask to be judged for what I did, not for what I am.”

Sentenced at first instance in September 2025 to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy, he spent twenty days in the Parisian health prison, becoming the first incarcerated former head of state in the history of the Republic.

This detention marked him: the decision of November 30, he will “wait for it, (…) not like a former President of the Republic but like a man who will ask himself every day when he wakes up, every evening when he goes to bed: am I going to go back?”, he confides to the three magistrates who hold his freedom and his political posterity in their hands.

– “Please, not that” –

He, who had not spared a glance at the attorneys general during the three days of indictment, turns towards them, stares at them.

At times appearing on the verge of tears, he said he was “hurt” that the prosecution had suggested that his 2007 election had been “biased” or described him as “a president under foreign influence”. “Not that, please, not that,” he cries.

Then Nicolas Sarkozy turns to the court again: “I care about my country and I cannot believe that in the France of 2026, a man is sentenced to seven years in prison for acts that he did not commit and against which after 14 years of investigation, there is no proof”.

During this entire trial, “I did not come here as in the office, I came here as one goes to a station of the cross. I tried to be worthy and to be true”, he concludes.

Before the curtain fell on the hearing, his quartet of lawyers worked to mock a legal file which would be a “grotesque novel”, a “hollow and artificial construction”, “crazy accusations”.

Nicolas Sarkozy would, according to Christophe Ingrain, not have been informed of the meetings of his relatives, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Guéant, at the end of 2005, with the No. 2 of the Libyan regime Abdallah Senoussi, secret meetings where the pact would have been made according to the accusation: money in exchange for various considerations, including an examination of the criminal situation of this dignitary, sentenced to life in France for having ordered the attack against the UTA DC-10 in 1989 (170 dead).

“Did you understand when the so-called corruptive pact was sealed? Not me,” says Mr. Ingrain.

And then what would have been his motive, asks his colleague, Me Sébastien Schapira, who pleads “common sense”: he insists on the “implausibility” of the story of a man “at the gates of the Elysée”, who would “enter into a Faustian pact” with “a raving madman”, Muammar Gaddafi, whom everyone knew unmanageable.

For Me Ingrain, “we do not condemn on a hypothesis”. However, according to him, the file is just that: a “scaffolding of hypotheses”. “The abysmal doubt that has run through this issue since the first day must result in restoring Nicolas Sarkozy’s honor,” concludes Sébastien Schapira.

A conviction which would sanction on November 30 a corruption pact with a foreign power, what is more a criminal dictatorship, would leave a deeper stigma than those, definitive, in the so-called wiretapping and Bygmalion cases.