Jail time begins for Nicolas Sarkozy
22 October 2025
Few tears will be shed by Roma in Europe at the news that Nicolas Sarkozy has become the first French ex-president to go to jail. Sarkozy began his five-year sentence on Tuesday morning (21 October) when he entered the 19th-Century La Santé prison in the Montparnasse district of Paris. The disgraced ex-president was convicted of conspiring to fund his 2007 election campaign with money from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
But for thousands of mainly Romanian and Bulgarian Roma, as well as French Travellers (Gens du voyage), Sarkozy is remembered more for relentlessly hounding them, and engaging in a campaign of mass expulsions that prompted condemnation from the European Parliament in 2010 for the “the inflammatory and openly discriminatory rhetoric lending credibility to racist statements and the actions of extreme right-wing groups”.
As the BBC reported, not since World War Two Nazi collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain was jailed for treason in 1945 has any French ex-leader gone behind bars. Sarkozy has been dogged by scandal ever since he left office in 2012, and even had to wear an ankle-tag after a separate conviction for attempting to bribe a magistrate last December.
But for many human rights activists across the EU, Sarkozy’s first strike for notoriety goes back to the three months between July and September 2010. The ‘Sarkozy approach’ – dawn raids and demolition of Roma camps followed by swift and summary ‘voluntary returns’ to the countries of origin – sparked an unprecedented spat between France and the European Commission. With both sides shouting ‘disgrace’ at one another, more by accident than design, the issue of Roma rights was thrust centre-stage in the European policy agenda, and attracting global media coverage. However, Sarkozy’s words and deeds also set a new low in terms of mainstreaming anti-Roma hate speech, dog-whistle politics and overtly repressive targeting of Europe’s largest ethnic minority.
The controversy kicked off in 2010: Sarkozy’s ruling right-wing government was struggling in the polls, and dogged by financial scandals, and Sarkozy seized the opportunity to target Roma to divert to divert attention from his own failings.
16 July 2010: Riots in the village of Saint-Aignan by Gens du Voyage after a 22-year-old French Traveller was shot and killed by police during a car chase, provided Sarkozy with a pretext to launch a series of measures directly targeting Bulgarian and Romanian Roma. He also stepped-up harassment of Gens du Voyage.
30 July 2010: Sarkozy made a speech in Grenoble condemning anti-police demonstrations and vowed to "put an end to the wild squatting and camping of the Roma". As president, he could not accept the fact that there were 539 Romani camps in his country, and he vowed that half of them would be gone within three months.
7 August 2010: The first camp clearance took place in Saint-Etiennne, when French police sealed off the area around the camp, preventing journalists and rights groups from seeing the evictions, which began before dawn and continued for several hours. The Loire regional prefect told journalists: "It is clear what I did this morning was in line with presidential instructions … There is no future here for Roma whose papers are not in order."
19 August 2010: A charter flight carrying 93 recently evicted Roma took off for Bucharest. Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, trumpeted: "We have closed down 40 illegal camps in the last two weeks." He said that 700 evictees would be sent back to their "countries of origin" within weeks. By 22 August, the government reported it had eliminated 88 Roma camps. Spiegel International reported:
“Now the government has taken to releasing counts representing the corresponding numbers of foreigners in those camps, a practice that hasn't been used in France since the 1940s, resulting in official statements to the effect that 700 Romanians were ‘evacuated’ from one location, 160 Bulgarians from another and 130 Roma from yet another camp.”
Critics from within Sarkozy’s own party described the policy as ‘shocking’. Jean-Pierre Grand even said the arrests recall the mass incarcerations of French Roma during the Nazi occupation, who were kept in internment camps for two years after the liberation, and was upset "that families have been split up by security personnel – on one side the men, on the other the women, and they are threatened with being split up from their children."
9 September 2010: The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning France for a policy that amounted to discrimination, called for an immediate suspension of all expulsions of Roma, and “rejected any statements which link minorities and immigration with criminality and create discriminatory stereotypes as well as the inflammatory and openly discriminatory rhetoric lending credibility to racist statements and the actions of extreme right-wing groups".
13 September 2010: Just days after immigration minister Eric Besson denied police actions were deliberately targeting Roma, a leaked memo revealed that assertion was a lie. The memo dated 5 August 2010, and signed by the chief of staff for interior minister Brice Hortefeux, which reminded French officials of a ‘specific objective’ set out by Sarkozy, instructing the préfect in each department “to begin a systematic dismantling of the illegal camps, particularly those of the Roma."
14 September 2010: EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding promised legal action and provoked outrage from the French government, and unbridled fury from Sarkozy, when she branded the expulsions of Roma as disgraceful, accused French ministers of duplicity, and described the situation as one she thought that “Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War". Reding, furious at have been lied to, stated: "This is not a minor offence in a situation of this importance. After 11 years of experience in the Commission, I even go further: this is a disgrace."
16 September 2010: The dispute between the French and the Commission overshadowed the 2010 EU summit even though it was not on the agenda. European Commission head, Barroso distanced himself from Reding's World War II analogy, but affirmed that "The prohibition of discrimination based on racial and ethnic origin is one of the EU's fundamental principles." Finland's Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb warned that the EU risked looking hypocritical: "When we promote free trade, climate change and human rights around the world we need to have our own backyard in order."
Speaking in Brussels at the end of the summit of EU leaders, Sarkozy claimed he had unanimous support from the bloc’s leader and that Chancellor Angela Merkel told him Germany was planning to follow France’s example and clear illegal camps of migrants. The claim was immediately contradicted by EU sources. One said: “It simply didn’t happen.”
19 October 2010: The dispute was wound down and Commission expressed its satisfaction that France had responded ‘positively’ to the Commission's official request, and had decided not to pursue an infringement procedure against France for alleged discrimination, instead demanding more proof to support France's claim that it was not deliberately targeting Roma.
While the EU controversy was short-lived, the consequences of Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric and repressive measures would be long-lasting. After Sarkozy’s election defeat, the incoming Socialist interior minister, Manuel Valls, proved even more enthusiastic about mass evictions and camp demolitions, acting “not just as interior minister, but as a citizen, as a militant member of the left.”
The ‘Sarkozy approach’ became the ‘new normal’, and racist prejudice and collective punishment of Roma became the new mainstream. This bi-partisan political embrace of coercive antigypsyism in France left a legacy, and an example for other states, where mass evictions and removals of Roma became routinized; and the far-right more emboldened to scapegoat and incite hatred against Roma. While it would be unbecoming to gloat at another’s misfortune, some might say ‘karma is a bitch’, as Sarkozy adjusts to life in a 9-11 m² cell in the solitary wing of the Santé prison, a prison whose famous former detainees include Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, and 1970s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
