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EVER since he lost the 2012 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy has been ensnared in judicial tangles. Last year, the former president was put under formal investigation for “abuse of frailty” of an elderly billionaire, only for the case to be dropped several months later. On July 1st he was again placed under formal investigation, this time on suspicion of trading favours and breaching judicial confidentiality. This does not rule out Mr Sarkozy’s political comeback—but casts a shadow over it.
In an unprecedented move for a former president, Mr Sarkozy was held in police custody for nearly 15 hours before being formally placed under investigation. The judges suspect him of trying to exchange confidential judicial information about another case involving him with a high-ranking prosecutor, Gilbert Azibert. The claim is that Mr Azibert, who has also been placed under investigation, was in return hoping for a plum job in Monaco. Mr Sarkozy and all the others involved deny the allegations.
This latest probe grew out of an entirely separate inquiry into alleged illegal financing of Mr Sarkozy’s successful 2007 election campaign by the former Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi. As part of the inquiry, investigators bugged the mobile phones of both Mr Sarkozy and his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, who was himself taken into police custody on June 30th and has now also been placed under formal investigation. It was while snooping on their phone calls that the investigating judges came across what they allege to be an attempt to trade favours. Mr Herzog dismissed the claims as “absurd”, and said the whole case was a “political affair”.
The timing of the latest case is particularly awkward for Mr Sarkozy, since he had been planning a return to politics ahead of the 2017 presidential election. His conservative UMP party is leaderless, after Jean-Francois Cope, its former boss, resigned in May in the wake of yet another financing scandal. Mr Cope’s chief of staff confessed to procuring fake invoices to cover a breach of campaign-financing limits during Mr Sarkozy’s unsuccessful 2012 re-election bid. Both Mr Cope and Mr Sarkozy deny any knowledge of this. A trio of former prime ministers—Francois Fillon, Alain Juppe and Jean-Pierre Raffarin—are now acting as caretaker party bosses ahead of a congress in November to elect a new leader. Those who have seen Mr Sarkozy say he is fired up for a comeback. Indeed, Mr Sarkozy came out fighting on July 2nd claiming that the latest case against him is a political “manipulation” and that the judges were out to “humiliate” him.
His allies hope their champion will not be tainted by this latest case but rather be seen as a victim of judicial hounding. Even the (apolitical) president of the Paris bar, Pierre-Olivier Sur, said this week that the investigators had “gone too far” in the way they handled the case. Yet some of Mr Sarkozy’s centre-right rivals would be just as happy to see him out of the race, particularly now that the deep unpopularity of the Socialist president, Francois Hollande, has enhanced the right’s prospects for 2017.
On the face of it, the chances of Mr Sarkozy surviving yet another investigation may seem slim. The allegations are serious and, on paper, carry a penalty of up to ten years’ imprisonment and a hefty fine. Judicial investigations in France can drag on for months, leaving his future uncertain. Yet this may be to underestimate Mr Sarkozy’s defiant steel. The former president is never more determined than when his back is against the wall. “He likes competition so much”, comments one senior UMP figure, “that when it doesn’t exist he creates it.”