Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy was President of France from 2007 to 2012 and has since been convicted in three separate criminal cases. Born in Paris in 1955 to a Hungarian immigrant father who left the family and a mother of Greek Jewish and French descent, he trained as a lawyer specialising in property. He became mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine at twenty-eight, and made his name in 1993 by negotiating in person with a man who had taken a nursery class hostage, carrying children out on camera. He betrayed his patron Jacques Chirac by backing Édouard Balladur in 1995 and spent years in the wilderness before returning as interior minister, where his hard line on crime and his description of rioting youths in the suburbs as rabble in 2005 defined him. He won in 2007 promising a rupture, and governed at a pace and with a personal visibility that broke with French presidential convention — the press called him the bling-bling president, and his divorce and remarriage to Carla Bruni were conducted publicly. He raised the pension age from sixty to sixty-two, reformed universities, and brought France back into NATO's integrated command. He held the EU presidency during the 2008 financial crisis and brokered the ceasefire in the Russo-Georgian war, and led the intervention in Libya in 2011. He lost to François Hollande in 2012. He was convicted in 2021 of attempting to bribe a judge and of illegal campaign financing in 2012, and in September 2025 of criminal conspiracy over Libyan funding of his 2007 campaign, receiving a five-year sentence and briefly entering prison before release pending appeal. He is the first former French head of state to be jailed since Marshal Pétain.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
