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The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is “not a danger” to France, and he would not support a united front of parties against Le Pen at the next election.
In his new book, written at a “small plywood table” in prison where he recently served 20 days of a sentence for criminal conspiracy, Sarkozy said many of his former supporters were now potential Le Pen voters, and he appeared to include the RN in his vision of a broad French right.
The path to rebuilding that right, he wrote, “might be long but I’m certain it can only happen through a spirit of gathering together in the broadest sense possible, with no exclusions and no opprobrium”.
Sarkozy’s comments in The Diary of a Prisoner come as Le Pen’s party appeals to traditional right voters in an attempt to broaden its base ahead of the 2027 presidential race.
The comments were in stark contrast to Sarkozy’s stance against the far right when he won the presidency in 2007, and his call in 2022 for voters to back the centrist Emmanuel Macron against Le Pen “in the interests of France” at the last presidential election.
In the book, to be published on Wednesday, Sarkozy details the time he spent in jail before being released last month, pending an appeal against his conviction over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Sarkozy, who is the first president in the history of modern France to have gone to jail, said he called Le Pen to thank her for her “courageous and unambiguous” support of him after he was convicted.
He said the current “judicial context” was something he and Le Pen had in common. He found it “particularly shocking” that Le Pen had been barred from running for office, including the 2027 presidency, after she was found guilty of embezzlement of European parliament funds on a vast scale earlier this year.
Le Pen will face an appeal trial next month, which will determine whether or not she can run for president in 2027 or whether her party president, Jordan Bardella, will replace her.
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Sarkozy said Le Pen had asked him, if there was a snap election, whether he would associate himself with the historical “republican front” of parties uniting to hold back Le Pen’s party.
“My answer was unambiguous: ‘No, and what’s more, I’d be open about it and take a public position on the subject when the time came,” Sarkozy wrote.
He added that one of Le Pen’s closest allies and MPs, Sébastien Chenu, had written him letters of support each week in prison, which were “sensitive, personal and human”.
Charles Kushner, the US ambassador to France, also asked to visit him in prison, Sarkozy said.
Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, once served a US jail sentence for illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion, among other charges. He received a presidential pardon from Trump in 2020.
Reuters reported that, although Kushner was granted permission to see Sarkozy behind bars, the two men did not meet until after his release.
A state department spokesperson told Reuters that Kushner had “wanted to visit former president Sarkozy out of personal compassion and respect to Sarkozy as a former French head of state and someone who has been a good friend to the United States”.
