—Elie Tassel-Maurizi, Emile Noel Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, NYU School of Law’s Jean Monnet Center, Junior Lecturer in International and Public Law at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University; and Matthieu Febvre-Issaly, Researcher in Law and Politics, Member of the Esprit French Magazine’s Editorial Committee[*]
1. Two Convictions with Major Legal and Political Consequences
In April and October 2025, French criminal courts handed down two convictions against major political leaders: (1) the first against Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, France’s main far-right political party and an official candidate in the next presidential election, with strong chances of success—she regularly tops opinion polls—for an embezzlement case involving European Parliament funds; (2) the second against former President Nicolas Sarkozy for the funding of his 2007 presidential campaign by Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
Both were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms: five years for Nicolas Sarkozy, and four years for Marine Le Pen, two of which are suspended (peine de prison avec sursis). Each sentence was accompanied by a five-year disqualification from holding public office (inéligiblité).
The legal and political consequences of these two convictions—widely discussed by the media, political figures, and experts in France and abroad—are difficult to assess. Both have been appealed and will therefore be reviewed in the future; moreover, they may be subject to varying degrees of challenge. While the Le Pen case appears difficult to contest from a criminal law standpoint, as it rests on known, established, and well-documented facts, the Sarkozy case raises more complex issues. The sprawling investigation in the latter involves numerous intermediaries and intricate financial arrangements, making the former president’s culpability difficult to establish with certainty. Nevertheless, the court found him guilty, relying on a body of corroborating evidence (faisceau d’indices concordants) pointing to substantial sums of money being transferred from Gaddafi’s inner circle to Sarkozy’s campaign team.
It should be noted that Sarkozy was acquitted of most of the charges initially brought against him, including embezzlement, but convicted of conspiracy for allowing his associates to arrange a possible act of corruption—an offence that, under French criminal law, requires only the intention to form a corrupt pact. Such a conviction necessarily entails a certain flexibility in the burden of proof. The evidence for the indictment was criticized by the defense and its supporters as indirect, yet the court’s 400-page judgment leaves little doubt as to the seriousness of its factual and legal reasoning.
However, it is not the substantive criminal issues of these cases that concern us here. French criminal litigation is bound by the principle of strict interpretation of the Penal Code. Whether this principle leaves room for judicial discretion—mostly in its application to factual situations—is not the subject of our inquiry.
We focus instead on their democratic consequences, viewed from a dual perspective: (1) because both convictions entail disqualification from holding public office and thus severely restrict the ability of two major political figures to run for office or otherwise influence political debate (although Sarkozy has already withdrawn from political life for several years); (2) because, in both cases, the judges applied a mechanism known as immediate enforcement (exécution provisoire), a procedural and exceptional instrument allowing judges to enforce their decision at first instance, even if it can later be appealed or reviewed.
The mechanism of immediate enforcement can be applied to various sentences, though its legal basis—rooted in the French Penal Code—varies depending on the nature of the penalty. It was applied to the disqualification from public office in Le Pen’s case and to the prison term in Sarkozy’s. Because of their impact on public life, the nature of these sentences and their immediate enforcement take the convictions beyond the criminal sphere and raise questions of democratic significance. Unsurprisingly, they are also the most hotly debated aspects of both cases in France. Some see them as evidence of judicial interventionism in political life, while others argue that judges are simply doing their job, applying the law as written.
2. Between Criminal Sanction and Political Impeachment
A distinctive feature of the French justice system is its ability to enforce a sentence after conviction in the first instance, even though under the Code of criminal procedure, a person convicted at first instance is presumed innocent until their appeal is heard—an argument raised by both parties. Judges do not necessarily have to wait for an appeal or a review by the Cour de cassation (the highest court in criminal matters) before their sentence can be enforced and produce effects.
In both cases, appeal proceedings could take place anytime between the coming months and the next year. The Paris Court of Appeal has stated that Marine Le Pen’s case will be heard before the next presidential election—a noteworthy concession to realpolitik, given that the course of justice is long and rarely aligns with the much faster rhythm of political life. In Sarkozy’s case, it will likely occur sooner, as often happens when detention is involved.
The rationale behind immediate enforcement is straightforward: a person who commits a crime while acting in an official capacity, and thereby abuses that position, should be deprived of liberty and/or temporarily excluded from public life to prevent recurrence. Their conviction should take effect immediately to ensure this preventive function. Appeals and reviews before the highest courts can take years; without immediate enforcement, a political leader could continue their career on the grounds that they have not yet been definitively convicted and are therefore presumed innocent. This was precisely the concern invoked by the judges in Le Pen’s conviction.
The tribunal justified immediate enforcement—supposedly preventing her from running in the next presidential election—by invoking the notion of a “major disturbance to democratic order.” Such reasoning was not an obvious choice; the underlying logic lies instead in the purpose of the legislation authorizing immediate enforcement. This rationale was also underscored by the Conseil Constitutionnel when it examined the constitutionality of the provisional enforcement of a disqualification from public office. The Court held that the mechanism “contributes to strengthening the requirement for elected officials to be honest and exemplary, and to maintaining voters’ confidence in their representatives,” thereby “implementing the constitutionally enshrined objective of safeguarding public order.”
The procedural instrument of immediate enforcement for disqualification from public office was introduced by parliamentary statute in the 2010s, following a series of political scandals involving the misuse of public funds. The new provisions aimed to reinforce the integrity and exemplary conduct expected of political leaders—many of the cases since then having arisen during Sarkozy’s presidency. The broader application of immediate enforcement to detention after conviction, as in Sarkozy’s case, is older and remains debated, although its aim is clear in criminal law: to avoid further danger from a convicted offender.
In the specific issues at stake here, these provisions pursue a legitimate goal—restoring public trust in political leaders and ensuring the effectiveness of criminal law—an objective widely shared at the time of their introduction. Their legitimacy was reflected in the cross-party support the reform received.
Yet one may ask: Are these sanctions and their immediate enforcement still appropriate in light of the charges that led to Le Pen and Sarkozy’s convictions? More bluntly, should judges have the authority to bar elected officials from running for office? The answers to these questions—first raised in the 2010s—are less straightforward than they may appear. We do not speak to the rationale behind each judgment but rather examine the effects of both the judgments and the legislative provisions they apply, in a country that has long protected its representatives from scrutiny since the Revolution, where democracy is often defended as “popular sovereignty” rather than the rule of law. This legacy explains why genuine constitutional review did not emerge until the second half of the 20th century.
As for alternatives, special jurisdictions, additional procedural safeguards, or alternative remedies could be considered—though at the risk of creating more lenient sanctions for white-collar crime or further isolating elected officials from the contemporary demand for equality and transparency, both crucial to ensuring fairness in the competition for power and the use of public money.
3. Public Morality and the Law: The Age of Virtuous Representative Democracy?
Behind these debates on repressive measures against public officials lies the enduring tension between democracy and the rule of law. This text cannot hope to resolve that constitutive gap between legality and justice. Yet the French concept of État de droit differs from the British or American rule of law: it refers primarily to the formal production of norms by competent state institutions, chiefly Parliament.
The issue here concerns the growing inclusion, over the past three decades, of moral standards for public officials, producing a new system of offences and procedures—most notably the Parquet national financier (PNF), established in 2013 as the national prosecutor for financial and corruption cases. It was thus foreseeable that such a framework would lead to the imprisonment or disqualification of current and former officials.
Today, however, this system fuels public discontent—its application necessarily depending on judges’ normative and factual interpretation—particularly regarding two right-wing figures. Marine Le Pen embodies the far right, while Nicolas Sarkozy, the last conservative president, remains a moral authority for many. Herein lies the paradox: beyond moral standards for public office, Sarkozy’s imprisonment forms part of a broader punitive turn, often supported by those on the right who now denounce it. Meanwhile, French prisons are notoriously overcrowded: La Santé, where Sarkozy benefits from a single cell for safety reasons, typically houses three or four inmates per cell. France currently has over 80,000 prisoners, compared with 61,000 in 2008 when Sarkozy came to power, and 51,000 in 2000.
The significance of Le Pen and Sarkozy’s convictions for law and politics in contemporary France is twofold: (1) Amid the declining legitimacy of representative institutions, should criminal law be the primary instrument for ensuring political credibility, transparency, and morality—at the risk of entrusting judges with more of the “people’s will” than their institutional role can bear? By allowing judges to impose political sanctions and enforce convictions immediately, do we not expose them to political backlash and risk turning convicted politicians into martyrs? (2) How should the État de droit be understood: as the exclusive domain of representative institutions, or as a plurality of sites where the norms of public life are shaped? Whether leading to imprisonment or disqualification, criminal sanctions alone will not resolve the democratic challenges at stake.
The central difficulty—both procedural (regarding remedies affecting prominent politicians) and substantive (the responsibility left to judges to bar convicts from office)—lies in France’s distinctive public discourse. Law and justice are constantly debated, yet lawyers and judges continue to be regarded as subordinate to the popular will expressed through elected representatives—a legacy of the Revolution. Reality, however, has changed: no authority is sacred. Conversely, a purely formalist defense of the État de droit is no longer tenable—it must address the substantive issues that law itself embodies. Are today’s repressive instruments targeting public officials sufficient—or excessive? And by what criteria?
Public morality is still seen as incorporated into positive, written law in France. Yet judges must decide. The attacks on judges involved in these two cases likely reflect political instrumentalization by figures who enjoy greater media access than judicial institutions. Judges rarely court the media spotlight, preferring to let their judgments speak for themselves. A recent sociological study showed that citizens’ attitudes toward the judiciary vary according to their political leaning and the subject matter: left-wing respondents emphasize social and racial inequalities before the law, while right-wing respondents tend to criticize lenient judges, especially in cases involving offenders with an immigration background.
These convictions, far from suggesting leniency, may instead reinforce the false perception of a two-tiered justice system targeting political figures—although the same critics from the right often demand harsher penalties overall. According to a still-powerful French myth, judges should not be drawn into political arguments, especially in a civil law system where their legitimacy rests on applying written law adopted by Parliament. Democratic legitimacy in France remains divided between a sacred political representation and a shameful État de droit, with the role of judges never quite admitted. This is no longer a realistic view of contemporary public morality. Should judicial reasoning evolve to include explicit justification for such decisions? Given the erosion of parliamentary debate and the decline of party politics, this question deserves renewed attention, as suggested by these two significant cases.
Suggested citation: Elie Tassel-Maurizi and Matthieu Febvre-Issaly, When Justice Confronts Power: The Legal and Political Stakes of the Le Pen and Sarkozy Convictions, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Nov. 12, 2025, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/when-justice-confronts-power-the-legal-and-political-stakes-of-the-le-pen-and-sarkozy-convictions/
[*] Our sincere gratitude to Margaret Satterthwaite, Peter Shane, Anaïs Brucher, and Mateo Merchán Duque for their careful reading and thoughtful comments. Their feedback greatly contributed to improving the text—a challenging task given the delicacy of the subject.