By DANIEL AFONSO DA SILVA*

The French are witnessing the end of the Fifth Republic before their very eyes

1.

General De Gaulle has multiple reasons to continue turning over in his coffin in this year of 2024, which marks the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris in 1944, the 56th anniversary of the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the 44th anniversary of his death in 1970.

The French regime appears to be slipping back into anomie. The monarchical presidentialism established by the French Constitution seems to be fading day by day. And nostalgia for the times of the general – or at least of François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac – is increasingly asserting itself in the daily lives of the French.

The undisputed success of holding the Olympic Games and the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, five years after that devastating fire, was not able to cover up the country's political, economic and social malaise.

President Emmanuel Macron predicted good days for 2024. However, over the course of the year, he has dismissed three prime ministers – Elisabeth Borne, Gabriel Atall and Michel Barnier. He arrives on Christmas Eve with a new prime minister, François Bayrou, who is clearly self-imposed. He is suffering an unquestionable regime crisis – started by the rise of party radicalism on the left with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and on the right with Marine Le Pen, after the 2008 financial crisis, and accelerated with the incomprehensible dissolution of the National Assembly last June 2024.

He has become a hostage to the parties, just like the presidents of the Third and Fourth French Republics. He remains powerless in the face of the political, economic and social turmoil sweeping the country. He is ending 2024 without a budget for 2025 and is completing half of his second term without any credible plan for stabilizing the country. This is causing the mood of the French to enter a stage of entropy never seen before. And, who knows, it may be worse than that experienced in 1940-1944.

If none of this were entirely sufficient to end this annus horribilis, Nicolas Sarkozy, an experienced French politician who was president of France from 2007 to 2012, has just been sentenced to three years in prison – one of which in a closed regime – on charges of corruption pact and influence peddling.

An unprecedented and unimaginable punishment for a successor of the general. Even when it comes to Nicolas Sarkozy: the first French president without any background or true notion of tragedy.

After the conviction, obviously, the former tenant of the Elysium He refutes the court's decision. He claims to be innocent. He protests to the four winds. But there is nothing he can do.

2.

Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of the French Republic, will start 2025 with restrictions on his freedom. Either in a common prison or under house arrest. In the case of the second option, he will be fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet.

Incredible. Humiliating. Regrettable. Unbelievable.

The old general is stunned by all this. And so is French society.

Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac. And Jacques Chirac succeeded François Mitterrand – the latter two – Mitterrand and Chirac – were great figures of French politics who deserved to be called statesmen.

She came to power in 2007, crushing the socialist Segolène Royal in the second round of the elections and inaugurating a new aesthetic in French politics. Less distant. More impulsive. Less discreet. Very present, and bordering on histrionic.

If General De Gaulle – following in the footsteps of his American counterpart, John F. Kennedy – was the one who inaugurated the conscious use of the media – at the time, television – as a political asset, Nicolas Sarkozy has now, in the 21st century, forced himself to live with all the innovations of the era of digitalization of life, from radio and television networks with continuous news to digital information resources, from the passivity of the internet to the anxiety of social networks. And, with this, he became the first president of the French Fifth Republic to mix and homogenize times and temporalities of actions, knowledge and powers. Making everything urgent, immediate, instantaneous. Including the full range of demands from all spheres of life. With extraordinary aggravating factors in the face of politics and the judiciary.

The acceleration of French public life driven by the instantaneous led France – and the entire world – to a certain imperative of transparency. This was not always a good advisor. But now it was becoming ubiquitous. It was breaking down hierarchies and imposing the illusion of a horizontal society. Just as the protesters of May 1968 had hoped. They, in the end, were leading to the end of the authorities.

Nicolas Sarkozy has been buried by this change of times. The most disconcerting result of which has been the exacerbation of voyeurism in and of the public service. Leading to the shameless stripping of the king. Desecrating the authority of authorities. And turning the President of the Republic into a common man. Without distinction or reserve.

In this context, France – and the rest of Europe and the West – began to experience a certain hypertrophy of the control bodies, especially the judiciary, over public action. Which, in other words, accelerated towards the evident judicialization of politics and, who knows, the politicization of the judiciary.

Everything that General De Gaulle opposed. Just like Montesquieu.

Montesquieu – like De Gaulle – is turning in his grave. The imperative of the separation of powers seems to have disappeared. Or worse, it seems to have become, sociologically, a struggle between powers.

The revolutionaries of the Bastille also turned in their mausoleums. The reckless “dictatorship of the judges” was beginning to return to society with an air of normality.

Instantly and naturally lowering the authority of the President of the Republic to little more than almost nothing. Which represents a true ignominy in the eyes of the old general.

3.

All this combined has led Nicolas Sarkozy, unlike his immediate predecessors – Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand – to be deprived of his means of distancing himself from the fervor of the moment. He is left with the open-air confrontation with the judiciary and its judges. In return, the judiciary and the judges act as implacable executioners. “France does not deserve this,” General De Gaulle would say.

But while still in office, Nicolas Sarkozy began to be investigated. Complaints were coming from all sides. Suspicions were coming from all directions. Evidence of irregularities was mounting. The king remained naked and without any protection.

As soon as he left the Elysium, after being defeated by François Hollande in the 2012 presidential elections, the attacks only increased. And, without the protective film of the presidency, he began to be insidiously monitored. Legally or illegally, no one knows. But that's how it was.

And in one of these voyeuristic expedients, one of the selfless “listeners to the president’s conversations” collected evidence, understood as corruption and presented as serious or very serious, which, marinated in the judges’ lockers, now results in this unappealable condemnation of General De Gaulle’s successor.

Back on the scene, the year was 2013. Nicolas Sarkozy was in talks with his lawyer and friend Tierry Herzog. The subject was the accusations of alleged illegal financing of his 2007 campaign, which suggested that he had received money from the Libyan dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, and, in return, had offered the Libyan leader “French state benefits”.

Here is the background. Nicolas Sarkozy was still apprehensive. And in this state, he asked his lawyer Herzog for help.

It didn't take long for Nicolas Sarkozy to sense that he was being monitored, with his phone tapped. Faced with the evidence, he discontinued the conversation through official channels. He acquired a new device. A disposable one registered in the name of Paul Bismuth. Through it he returned to parliament with his lawyer. Now he suggested that he find definitive ways to end the investigation. Essentially by enlisting the support of Judge Gilbert Azibert. He would have the information and contact details to do so. And, at the same time, by resolving the situation, he could receive, in return, a "push" from Nicolas Sarkozy towards a position on the Council of State of Monaco.

This is what the “listener” heard and recorded. Thus producing “materiality” for another investigation. Now under the pretext of “intention”: “intention to commit a crime”.

Nicolas Sarkozy was speaking privately with his lawyer. No one can know for sure whether he was serious or simply daydreaming. There was never any contact with Judge Azibert. And Azibert, for his part, never applied for the new position in Monaco. But Nicolas Sarkozy’s “intention” was collected, analyzed and classified as “criminal intent”. Transposed as a “corruption pact” and “influence peddling”.

Eleven years have passed. A very long process has been underway. Until last Thursday, December 18, 2024, the French justice system delivered its verdict: Nicolas Sarkozy, former President of the Republic, is guilty and definitively sentenced without the right to appeal.

It is not up to the observer – especially a non-French person and someone far from France – to assess the decision of the French justice system. The defendant – French or not –, once he is found guilty and patient, will always deny guilt. In the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, it would be no different. And, for this reason, he intends to claim his innocence before the European Court of Human Rights. Where he has a great chance of morally reversing the decision of the French justice system, since the case seems, in theory, to be riddled with flaws.

The first is, in theory, a breach of decorum when “clandestine” wiretapping was carried out on Nicolas Sarkozy. The second is, in theory, a breach of the principle of the inviolability of conversations between lawyer and client. The third is, in theory, an incomprehensible “crime of intent” – which makes “intent” a “crime”, even if the “intent” is nothing more than an “intention”. And the fourth is, in theory, a latent and clear desire for revenge on the part of sections of the French judiciary against the now convicted Nicolas Sarkozy.

A moral reversal of the European Court’s ruling will hardly free Nicolas Sarkozy from the restriction of his civil and civic rights. But it will only increase French malaise, which ultimately corresponds to the malaise of all liberal democracies in the West.

The French are witnessing the end of the Fifth Republic before their very eyes. General De Gaulle created this new regime under the pretext of the unblemished authority of his leaders. And, in this sense, he never considered the possibility of ordering the arrest of a tenant or former tenant of the Elysium. With the arrest of Nicolas Sarkozy, despite the controversy, the regime is fading. A president of the Fifth Republic does not fit in a prison. Unless we move to another Republic.

*Daniel Afonso da Silva Professor of History at the Federal University of Grande Dourados. author of Far beyond Blue Eyes and other writings on contemporary international relations (APGIQ). [https://amzn.to/3ZJcVdk]

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