Corruption scandals among conservatives? In France one can see how such cases destroy a party in the long run. Today the Republicans hardly stand a chance.
Christian Democrats in Germany have lost a lot of approval these days and lost some MPs because they enriched themselves in the pandemic or lobbied for dubious foreign regimes. A look at France shows how such scandals can destroy a party in the long term: In the neighboring country, countless trials over corrupt Republicans have shrunk the decade-long ruling conservatives. A trial against former President Nicolas Sarkozy and his election campaign team from 2012 was only due to start this week, because the campaign was financed with twice as much money as is legally allowed, namely with more than forty million euros.
The Bygmalion trial, named after Sarkozy’s PR agency, was postponed for a few weeks because a lawyer fell ill with corona. But he’s only one of many anyway. The former head of state has around a dozen preliminary investigations and trials, and even his biographers get confused in interviews given the sheer number. The lawyer was recently sentenced to one year in prison for bribing a judge to obtain information in a further trial – which in turn involved 50 million euros in undeclared donations from the former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Sarkozy was once a conservative hero in France, a bustling guy with brute slogans who wanted to “chase away the bandits in the suburbs with a high-pressure cleaner” and urge the French to “work more to earn more“.
Even today, Sarkozy has many supporters who would like to run him again as a candidate for the presidential election in April 2022. Sarko, as the French call him, regularly waves him away, but the fact that he is even under discussion shows only one further shortcoming: The conservatives are at a loss as to who should stand for them. A novelty for a party with which presidents such as Jacques Chirac and most recently Sarkozy once came to power unchallenged.
Learned to consider yourself invulnerable
A handful of people are talking this time, but they too are connected to the Sarko system. For example, Rachida Dati, his former Minister of Justice, or Xavier Bertrand, long-time Minister of Labor under Sarkozy. None of them are particularly popular; the Republicans have so far been waiting in vain for a “natural candidate” to emerge. In the polls, none of their possible candidates comes in at more than ten percent, party leader Christian Jacob is not even represented in the list due to a lack of votes.
The only thing left for the Republicans is the internal party primary, which, however, was their undoing in 2017. At that time, the members elected François Fillon as their candidate – a man whose program was to restore “law and order” in France, only to be exposed as an embezzler in the middle of the election campaign: he had employed his wife as a parliamentary assistant for years without that she had actually worked. Fillon has now been sentenced to two years in prison. Like Sarkozy, he appealed, but both the last president and the last Republican candidate have one leg in jail.
For the Belgian criminologist Carla Nagels, the conservative elite – to which she explicitly belongs well-networked business lawyers like Sarkozy – learned to consider themselves invulnerable. “From an early age they are used to their voices being heard; they consider it possible to negotiate laws. In their eyes, rules are changeable for everyone for them personally.” According to Nagels studies, the better-off classes and professions consider it more legitimate to break the rules than anyone else. “You justify this by not being able to observe this or that norm in the course of your big task.”