Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review.
Nicolas Sarkozy remains a political animal even if he is in difficulty.
This is what emerges from his televised performance during the 20h of TF1, just 48 hours after the judgment condemning him and which he appealed.
The intervention of the former President was in accordance with the constitutive qualities of his image: combativeness, rhetorical striking, energetic gestures, the strength of the repartee, the ability to challenge and bring the listener to put himself in his place. .
Nicolas Sarkozy did what he certainly does best: defend himself, unfolding with the verbal pedal of the wheeler, a three-point argument whose function is to operate on the register of contrast to better push the opponent's position .
Nicolas Sarkozy was careful not to denounce "political justice", much less the role of the national financial prosecutor at the heart of many controversies and other suspicions.
It all started with the figure of a judicial apparatus deploying force means, dissecting the facts, gestures and words of the former president for years to end in a conviction based on an exclusively intentional presupposition and whose demonstration, tenuous, is not lacking to allow a form of judicial subjectivity to shine through.
It is indeed a casuistry that the former head of state wanted to denounce: the extreme fragility of the judges' reasoning, in his eyes, led to an infamy of injustice, the red mark of a "
pact
".
of corruption
”.
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Sarkozy condemned: "a lowering of the level of requirement as regards evidence"
Everything continued with the expression of an irrefutable individual will resisting a human machinery much more than an institutional one.
Nicolas Sarkozy was careful not to denounce "
political justice"
, much less the role of the national financial prosecutor at the heart of many controversies and other suspicions.
Where some were probably expecting him on this theme, he distanced himself from it, recalling his respect for the functioning of institutions, to better address the human dimension dependent on a decision supported by investigative methods that do not respect the confidentiality of the relationship of a litigant with his defender - which would not fail at the end of the day to have France condemned by the European court of human rights.
It was like the last word of a first act last night, making the French the only judges of its sincerity.
It all ended with the primacy of the democratic order over the risk of judicial interventionism in the political calendar: it is the French, that is to say the people in the last instance, who will decide the political fate of the some and others, and not a few men, even if they were magistrates, who would try their hand at a mission bordering on transgression with the sacrosanct principle of separation of legitimacy.
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Trial of wiretapping: "'' the rule of law '' hides, more and more, a government of ideological judges"
The stake of Nicolas Sarkozy's intervention was first of all to leave nothing in doubt.
It was the word of an indignant and bruised man who considers himself the object of a cabal, of a crime of antipathy, and recalling his final withdrawal from political competition, he explicitly argued that his fight was mainly of a moral nature, but that it had exemplary value for everyone.
It was necessary, after having lodged an appeal which legally erases everything from the first instance, to relaunch this showdown which opposes it to legal proceedings which it considers exorbitant.
It was like the last word of a first act last night, making the French the only judges of its sincerity.
The rest is to come ...
