Nicolas Sarkozy expected the rise of Trump – and perhaps his downfall.

On Monday, a French court handed down a ruling that is perhaps more suited to the ideas of March than the first of March. The tribunal has declared that former president Nicolas Sarkozy was guilty of corruption and influence on the purchase of cases and sentenced him to three years in prison, although he will only have to serve one, and even that will probably not happen for years. The decision was attacked by supporters on the right as a political assassination and applauded by critics on the left as the just reaction of the republic.

The most striking parallels, however, are not with the ancient Roman republic, but with the contemporary American republic. The causes of Sarkozy’s rise and fall, as well as the political and judicial consequences that followed, foresee the recent career of a US president who ignored the public benefit for private purposes and expected to be served by the republic rather than to serve it.

When Sarkozy defeated Socialist Ségolène Royal in the 2007 presidential election, the country was galvanized. Instead of marking another transfer of power between France’s traditional right and left, it appears that Sarkozy’s victory was a break. Sarkozy was something new in French politics.

Unlike almost all his conservative and socialist predecessors, who were products of the country big schools– the parallel system of higher education that trains the country’s political and intellectual, financial and industrial elites – Sarkozy scrapped the law school. But that hardly mattered. Sarkozy was ambitious and arrogant and eluded him in the world of finance and industry, and then in the world of conservative politics. During the 1980s and ’90s, he quickly rose through the ranks of the movement and served in a series of ministerial positions. The most important was by far the Home Secretary, where he came to the world’s attention with the outbreak of riots in the country’s disaffected and derelict suburbs in 2005. He promised to take these neighborhoods of the race, or knee brace, if necessary use a Kärcher – a branded washer.

His language did little to calm the unrest, but excited the Conservative government. Sarkozy followed this populist action during his campaign for the presidency, which he correctly managed as a self-proclaimed outsider and an object of politics. In this spirit, he announces his intention to restrict immigration and create a ministry of immigration and national identity. That Sarkozy associated this identity with the ‘Gauls’ – a mythical construct on which earlier French governments struggled to give the nation a sense of collective identity – was, in the eyes of his supporters, no more a problem than his failure. to establish a national census based on ethnic background. Sarkozy’s political failures weigh little against his rhetorical successes. Sarkozy’s ethnic dog whistles called to him the millions of French people for whom a changing demographic and economy made them feel like they were no longer at home in France.

Along with his gross populism, Sarkozy also threw himself into ‘peopleism’. The French phrase for celebrity culture the people is inside the Elysée with Sarkozy. The sunglasses and jewelry sport Sarkozy, called President Bling-Bling, enjoyed him from the company of stars, ranging from his wife, singer and model Carla Bruni, to iconic rocker Johnny Hallyday. As for the people who chose him in the Elysée, Sarkozy bet that his rhetorical extravagance would satisfy them. At the end of his five-year frenetic period, riddled with failed attempts at institutional and constitutional reforms, however, Sarkozy was defeated by the feeble socialist François Hollande, who sincerely called himself ‘Monsieur Normal’.

Replaces the former US President for Sarkozy and the current one for the Netherlands, and this summary reads as a French prelude to our own presidential election in 2020. As if to underline the parallels, Sarkozy’s life after the presidential case went from one courtroom to the next struggled. This week’s case is just one of dozens in which Sarkozy has been trapped since moving out of the Elysée in 2012. Greed and greed are at the heart of most of these matters, and although some have been suspended and others do not directly imply. Sarkozy, at least four cases are still under judicial investigation. Most disturbing is the investigation into whether the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi channeled large sums of money into Sarkozy’s successful presidential election in 2007.

Just as with the Republican Party, which did not break with Trump in the aftermath of the Capitol uprising, but rather joined behind him, so too with Les Républicains, the Conservative party created by Sarkozy. The party’s ranking is still attached to Sarkozy, while the leadership has been waiting for Sarkozy to run again in next year’s presidential election. In fact, without another candidate who could seriously challenge the two frontrunners – President Emmanuel Macron and Judge Marine Le Pen – Les Républicains would not have a Plan B if Sarkozy did not participate. This partly explains the declaration of loyalty by the current leaders of the party, who rejected the ‘judicial ruthlessness’ and ‘revenge’ behind these charges.

Here, too, Sarkozy shares a trait with his American analogue. While he did his best to divide the country while in office, he at least managed to unite his own party as long as he remained in the public eye.