Wow, some good bribing this asshole did.

(For those who do not recall: Sarkozy was in power when Gaddafi was murdered and the country destroyed.)

Fox News:

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was placed under formal investigation and handed preliminary charges over allegations his 2007 presidential campaign received more than $60 million from former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The charges reportedly include illicit funding of a campaign, receiving money from Libyan embezzlement, and passive corruption.

Sarkozy, 63, was in custody Tuesday but was freed on bail Wednesday following days of questioning. It remained unclear if he can travel outside France.

He denied any wrongdoing and said his Libyan accusers were seeking revenge on him for his decision to send warplanes during the uprising in 2011 that led to Gadhafi’s downfall and death, the BBC reported.

Authorities also reportedly questioned Sarkozy’s former minister and close ally Brice Hortefeux on Tuesday.

Investigators are looking into whether the former president secretly accepted $61.6 million in total for his 2007 campaign from the late Libyan dictator. The figure is more than twice the allowed funding for a campaign at the time.

The payments would also violate the country’s rules against foreign financing.

Modern Western politicians are so horrible they can’t even do corruption correctly.

Le Pen has pointed out that this might have influenced his decision to support the bombing of Libya.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing National Front, said the money could have influenced Sarkozy’s decision in 2011 to join military intervention against the Gadhafi regime.

“We are talking about a war which was decided about the elimination of a head of state, about the destabilization of a country and about the wave of migration that has followed,” said Le Pen, according to the paper.

That is a stupid narrative.

He presumably took the money because he agreed to prevent a bombing of Libya. And he could have continued getting favors from Gaddafi if he’d not been murdered. The reason he supported the “regime change” program is that he is a Jew and a tool of the international kike system.

But of course, Le Pen won’t name the Jew, and will even denounce her own father for doing so.

If anything, by doing this Sarkozy risked being found-out. I have no idea why Gaddafi didn’t make secret records of the transactions with a dead man’s switch set to send to the media in the event of his death. Probably because as much as we like the Colonel, he’s still a shitstupid Arab.

tfw your daughter says “Islam is French.”

eeee.

This is rough.

Marine is such a horrible feminist nightmare woman. She has literally collapsed the entire party.

The old man is saying exactly what I’ve been saying, though I really don’t think he should have said it. I mean, I understand he’s pissed off, but Sarkozy is a Jew and is pro-EU.

The Local:

If you wanted any confirmation of how far to the right presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy was swaying in order to get elected, it came in the words of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the far right Front National.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of the current party leader Marine, has criticized his daughter for being too “centrist” and has suggested his real heir is Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarkozy, who beat Jean-Marie Le Pen to become president of France in 2007, is fighting to win the centre-right primary election in November which would give him a strong chance of being re-elected as head of state next May.

As part his campaign to beat rival Alain Juppé to be the chosen conservative candidate in November’s primary, Sarkozy has occupied the terrain normally held by the National Front’s Le Pen.

He has spoken repeatedly of the need for France to put a stop to immigration, close its borders, lock up those suspected of having jihadist sympathies and of how Muslims must assimilate to French culture.

He also wants to take on Europe and end the deal that sees Britain’s border on the French side of the English Channel.

As a result he has made Le Pen senior very proud and a little jealous.

“He is occupying the ground that Marine Le Pen has abandoned to go to the centre. [Sarkozy] on the other hand has left the centre ground to head towards the nationalist and populist right, that is winning over public opinion due to the pressure of recent events,” said Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“It’s not me that has become more like Sarkozy, it’s him that has become more like Jean-Marie Le Pen,” said the former FN party leader.

Le Pen also criticised his daughter for recently “renouncing the Front National’s flame logo and the FN initials “that have got us so far. It’s suicidal,” he said.

At a recent election rally for Marine Le Pen’s 2017 campaign all mention of the National Front and even the name “Le Pen” were dropped from the posters as she attempts to distance herself from the more extreme elements within the party, like her father, and make herself more electable.

Le Pen senior, of course, has a reason or two to have a dig at his daughter.

He was unceremoniously banned from the party after he repeated inflammatory remarks he had made in the past, referring to Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history.”

He is still fighting his corner through the courts.

His bitter dispute with his daughter means that she is not guaranteed her father’s vote in next year’s presidential election.

“I don’t know [who I will vote for]. Over the next seven months anything can happen,” he said.

As I say.

I encourage my French readers to vote for Le Pen, despite her disgusting shilling, because the main issue remains the EU, and she is going to do a referendum. Jew Sarkozy isn’t, and that’s why he’s out there out-shitlording her. The ideas of NF were popular. These new ideas she’s promoting are not.

This has been my message to the Alt-Right all along. If you cuck, you lose everything. You gain nothing. Maybe some of the figures involved in leading you into a sellout will get rich, or get shows on TV, but the movement will collapse and you will lose. It happened to the Tea Party and it has happened to the FN.

Cucking doesn’t make you more palatable. It just makes you look weak and pathetic. The reason people are drawn to the right is that they want strength and principles. If you cuck, you lose all appeal.

We gain nothing from being implicit. We must continue be absolutely explicit.

It isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only thing that works.

I’ve been pretty black pill about the Marine Le Pen campaign, since on most issues, the Jew Sarkozy is proving more hardcore than she is.

But she’s picked a hardcore guy to run her campaign, which is a pretty good sign of things to come.

France24:

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Saturday named the young politician David Rachline as the director of her presidential campaign, a risky choice who should appeal to party loyalists, while she reaches out to a broader audience.

Le Pen made the widely expected announcement during a speech to supporters in the Mediterranean city of Fréjus in an event that, by her own account, marked “the start of the mobilization for this presidential campaign”.

Rachline, 28, has been the mayor of Fréjus since April 2014 and the youngest member of France’s Senate since October of the same year. The leader of the anti-immigration National Front (FN) party described him as “a man who symbolizes youth, work, merit, loyalty and success”, as she made his campaign appointment official.

He is also a politician with a questionable past and who has stoked controversy since he took over the mayor’s office two years ago. Experts said he represented a crafty, although risky, pick. Rachline could help Le Pen quell divisions within her party and appeal to her core constituents, while she softens her message in the quest for new voters.

“It may be a careless decision, because David Rachline has a track record for saying extreme things, and Marine Le Pen does not want to scare people and wants to avoid gaffs at all costs,” said Nicolas Lebourg, a political analyst at the left-leaning Fondation Jean Jaurés think tank.

“Or it may be part of a strategy to counterbalance her softer image, because she still needs to keep the FN’s core voters fired up,” he added.

Yeah, either that, or the extreme message is exactly what works, and what she needs. Which is obviously what it is.

It’s a good decision.

Basically, she needs to aggressively walk-back all of the cucking she has done over the last 2 years, and she needs to do it quickly. Because most people won’t vote on the only issue that matters: the Frexit.

Most people will vote on more emotional and more seemingly immediate issues, such as the ones Sarkozy is addressing. Islamic invasion stuff. However, minor alterations to the way the Islamic invasion is being handled are pointless and silly. And they are things that the EU can just change later anyway.

Step one is to get out of the EU. After that’s done, everything else can be figured out later.

And according to recent polls, the majority of the French will vote leave, if they’re given the chance.

This is all that the election is about. Which is why Sarkozy the kike was brought in to have policies that are more right-wing than Le Pen – he isn’t going to call for the Frexit. He is just going to say anything to get himself elected so that he can keep the country in the Union.

Because in the very near future, as integration intensifies, specific policies of specific countries won’t even matter, because everything will be determined by Brussels.

Here’s a good picture for seeing the Jew in him.

At this point, if you remove Frexit, Jew Sarkozy’s platform is better than Le Pen’s.

Of course, the EU is the Jew’s most important agenda in Europe, as it is the key to Jewing the entire continent.

But I don’t think it’s going to be enough to win the election.

Le Pen was destined to run unopposed this cycle – why she decided to cuck out on pretty much everything, I have no idea. It could be her partial-kike boyfriend, or it could just be that she’s a woman and likes destroying things men built to prove how important she is.

But wow.

While Hofer’s win is going to go down as one of the biggest far-right coups in history, Le Pen’s failure is going to go down as the biggest-ever screw-up.

I’m so pissed off.

France24:

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was likened to Donald Trump this week after the latest in a string of provocative statements that have pushed his presidential campaign ever further to the right.

The comparison with the Republican candidate for the White House, a notorious climate change sceptic, followed a speech on Wednesday in which Sarkozy appeared to question the extent of human involvement in global warming.

In remarks delivered at a business conference and relayed by his office, Sarkozy, who is having another shot at the French presidency after his failed re-election bid in 2012, claimed climate change was receiving too much attention.

“It’s an interesting topic, but climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years,” said the 61-year-old. “Humans are not the only ones responsible.”

…

Either way, Sarkozy’s words were interpreted as an about-face and further evidence of a rightward shift by the former president, whose first move upon clinching the French presidency in 2007 was to launch a cross-party debate on ways to advance sustainable development and a green agenda.

Reacting to his remarks, Emmanuelle Cosse, France’s housing minister and a former Green Party leader, said Sarkozy was “dragging us back 15 years” with his “obscurantist” rhetoric. She added: “He’s sounding like Donald Trump.”

Pandering to the far right

It is not the first time France’s mercurial former “hyper-president” has been likened to the US tycoon. Last month, a column in Germany’s Tageszeitung daily said Sarkozy’s provocative statements on security, Islam and immigration had turned him into a “Trump à la française”.

The newspaper warned that the tone of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign was playing into the hands of the far-right National Front party of Marine Le Pen, who is widely expected to feature in the second round of next year’s election.

“The worst thing is not that Sarkozy might win,” the paper wrote. “But that he is shifting the entire political debate onto the nefarious terrain of fear and xenophobia, on which only the far right can triumph.”

Well, I guess that’s the upshot.

Sarkozy’s brand of national identity politics has positioned him as a hardliner among the dozen candidates vying for the presidential nomination of conservative party Les Républicains (formerly the UMP), which will be contested in a two-round November primary open to all voters who profess to adhere to “the values of the right and the centre”.

Since the start of the year, Sarkozy has vowed to curb economic immigration, suspend the reunification of immigrant families, toughen conditions for naturalisation, restrict birthright citizenship, and replace the “integration” of immigrants with a policy of “assimilation”, which calls for newcomers to shed traces of their origins to embrace French habits and traditions.

Sarkozy has basically said Moslems have to completely adopt French culture, including getting rid of their religion. This obviously isn’t going to happen, but it’s what he’s saying.

Meanwhile, Le Pen is saying Moslems can be French.

He has seized headlines at a time of heightened public anxiety following a series of extremist attacks, calling for a nationwide ban on “burkini” swimsuits and issuing dire warnings of social strife if France fails to uphold its civic values, which he associates with a militant form of secularism.

…

When Sarkozy swept into the Elysée Palace nine years ago with more than 53% of the vote, his camp claimed credit for bringing the National Front’s score down to a comparative low of 10%. But by 2012 far-right voters had lost faith in Sarkozy and the FN vote bounced back to 18%.

This article even states plainly that he is further right than Le Pen now, due to her changes, which were supposedly to make the party more popular.

Sarkozy’s attempts to win back their support has seen him adopt tougher stances on some issues than even Le Pen.While the latter professes her attachment to Republican values and the French constitution – part of her strategy to “de-toxify” the National Front – Sarkozy has argued that the fight against terrorism should take precedence over the rule of law, for instance, by suggesting that individuals deemed to pose a potential threat to public security be locked up.

…

Critics of Sarkozy’s rightward move have argued that a similar strategy failed him during the 2012 campaign, which saw the then-incumbent president adopt a more right-wing platform than in 2007. Frédéric Lefebvre, a former junior minister who advised Sarkozy on both campaigns, said the differing outcomes were evidence that a more conciliatory programme was necessary to win a presidential election.

“France is a country of equilibrium and a candidate cannot stand on a pumped-up right leg and an atrophied left leg,” he told FRANCE 24. “In 2007 we found the right balance, but then Sarkozy drifted away, adopting identity politics as his battle cry five years later, with an outcome we all know.”

That’s retarded.

Sarkozy lost in 2012 because of Le Pen. That’s the only reason a socialist was elected – the right was split. In 2007, you didn’t have problems this extreme.

I think Sarkozy is going to come out with statements in support of Trump.

Remember that this traitorous female Le Pen denounced him because he was too hard on Moslems.

Just cuck my shit up, fam.

Le Pen has on her platform the most important positions, which are an exit from the EU, and exit from NATO and an exit from the euro. And there are still a lot of good people in NF, despite her best efforts to remove them. Plus Sarkozy is a Jew. As such, I still endorse her, and encourage all of our French readers to go out and vote for her.

But there is almost no chance she’s going to win, unless she readopts her father’s policies.

Proof That Watering Down the Message is a Failing Strategy

This situation is absolute proof that the strategy of cucking yourself to appeal to the normies is a failing strategy.

I just wrote an article about this.

Welp.

I think Le Pen is going to lose. She went so soft, that the only difference between her and Sarkozy is that she wants to leave the EU, and that position – when it is totally isolated from all other right-wing politics – just confuses and worries a lot of people.

The kike Sarkozy is in it to win it.

Irish Times:

Former French president and candidate for next year’s presidential election Nicolas Sarkozy has joined the ranks of Donald Trump and Danny Healy-Rae as a climate sceptical politician.

The version of Mr Sarkozy’s remarks at the Institut de l’enterprise on September 14th provided to the Agence France Presse (AFP) by his campaign manager is slightly less extreme than quotes reported by Marianne magazine, which was also present.

“The climate has been changing for four billion years,” Mr Sarkozy said, as quoted by Marianne. “The Sahara became a desert, not because of industry. One has to be as arrogant as man to think it’s us who changed the climate.”

Mr Healy-Rae, the Independent Kerry TD, made a similar argument in the Dáil last May, saying that patterns of climate change went back over centuries, “before there was ever a combustible engine working in this or any other country” and that “God above is in charge of the weather and we here can’t do anything about it.”

The official version of Mr Sarkozy’s speech noted that the COP21 climate conference had taken place (last December in Paris). “But the climate has been changing for 4½ billion years. Man alone is not responsible for this change.”

Mr Sarkozy said he would prefer people discuss a “much more important subject: the demographic shock.” France ought to convene a conference on demographics, he said. “The earth has never known a demographic shock like the one that is coming, since there will be 11 billion of us in a few years. Man is directly responsible for that, and no one is talking about it.”

It’s a complete hoax, and everyone is sick of hearing about it. Denial is a bold move, but a smart one. He’ll benefit from this.

And what is Le Pen doing?

Cucking for hajis harder than Sarkozy does, while putting all of her eggs in the Frexit bushel.

I’m so sick of women in politics. This should have been so, so easy, and this bitch went and screwed it all up.

I want to make it clear to our French readers that I do definitely still endorse Le Pen, as Frexit is by far the most important issue of this election. And I certainly don’t want yet another Jew in power. Also, there are still a lot of good people in the NF, even if the party’s head has done her best to destroy it.

Here’s a documentary about the global warming hoax, in case anyone isn’t up on this particular kike operation.

Once again demonstrating the inability of our feminist society to blame women (or Jews) for anything, David Cameron is being blamed for supporting Hillary’s Jew-backed campaign against Libya.

Everyone knows that the UK government just does whatever America tells it to do. So what is the point of blaming David Cameron for an American operation?

BBC:

A UK parliamentary report has severely criticised the intervention by Britain and France that led to the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The foreign affairs committee accused the then PM David Cameron of lacking a coherent strategy for the air campaign.

It said the intervention had not been “informed by accurate intelligence”, and that it led to the rise of so-called Islamic State in North Africa.

The UK government said it had been an international decision to intervene.

Yeah.

They just happened to come to the internal decision at the same time Hillary was telling them to do it.

The action had been called for by the Arab League and authorised by the UN Security Council, the Foreign Office added.

An international coalition led by Britain and France launched a campaign of air and missile strikes against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in March 2011 after the regime threatened to attack the rebel-held city of Benghazi.

But after Gaddafi was toppled, Libya descended into violence, with rival governments and the formation of hundreds of militias, while so-called Islamic State, also known as Isil and Daesh, has gained a foothold.

The committee’s key conclusions include:

• Through his decision making in the National Security Council, David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy
• The possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from the rebellion should not have been the preserve of hindsight
• It saw no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya. UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence
• The limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya
• Political engagement might have delivered civilian protection, regime change and reform at lesser cost to the UK and to Libya
• British troops should not be deployed to Libya in a training role until the Government of National Accord has established political control, stabilised internal security and made a formal request to the UK Government for such assistance, which should then be considered by the UK Parliament

Mr Cameron has defended his handling of the situation, telling MPs in January action was needed because Gaddafi “was bearing down on people in Benghazi and threatening to shoot his own people like rats”.

LOL @ “like rats.”

I guess that speaks to the British lack of understanding of guns. No one shoots rats, they’re too small and fast. You have to trap them.

Earlier this year, Barack Obama also blamed Cameron for the Libya disaster, saying he allowed it to become a “shit show.”

But leaked emails have shown that this entire operation was arranged by Hillary Clinton with the dirty kike Sidney Blumenthal and that it was mainly about stealing Libya’s oil. They trained the terrorists that attacked the Gaddaffi government, then said they were “rebels.” Blumenthal himself admitted to inventing the “Viagra rape crisis” propaganda that Hillary promoted.

Sure, David Cameron can be blamed for being a puppet of the US (and to a lesser extent France and the Jew Sarkozy, who is admitted to have plotted to takeover the country), but the report doesn’t mention that. It just pushes a disgraced politician further under a bus he’s already under for having shilled for Bremain – also for the sake of the US administration.

Who cares?

What a pointless report.

This is like that Chilcot Iraq war report hoax. Nothing is included that matters. Nothing about the Jews, nothing about the collusion with the US at all. In both cases, the responsibility of the US is simply for willingly functioning as a puppet state. Nothing more.

Cameron, at least, can claim he didn’t know the intelligence the US was feeding him was bad. I mean, he surely did know, but unlike with Tony Blair’s knowledge of the Iraq hoax, which has been documented through leaks.

The real blame is with the kikes who run Washington, DC.

The Hungarian-Greek-French kikeservative Nicolas Sarkozy has attacked immigrants for refusing to assimilate, while at the same time demanded that Britain take all of the sickening monkeys his country has allowed to squat in Calais.

The Jew Sarkozy is attempting a political comeback presently. To all appearances, he seems to have been drafted-in as a popular cuck/kike alternative to the nationalist Marine Le Pen. Despite Le Pen’s endless pandering to Jews, which involved such extremes as attacking her own father, the Jews still don’t like her.

This is really a weird combination of points to make in the same day, one might think, but they will both be seen as pro-French.

Daily Express:

Family reunification for migrants must be suspended until the EU agrees on a solid immigration policy for all member states, said France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The right-wing politician was speaking ahead of next year’s presidential election where he said the problem had to be tackled.

The former president said: “My aim is to bring back authority and defend the French Republic.”

Mr Sarkozy said that the current situation in France was “deeply grave” and that his country needed someone experienced, energetic, determined, and with authority to help it get back on its feet.

Mr Sarkozy, whose decision to run in next year’s presidential election was announced on Monday, is known for his unyielding stance on immigration, and has made his intention to stop the tide coming into France very clear.

In an interview with Le Figaro yesterday, he said: “If I am named president, France will renegotiate Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights, which deals with family reunification.

”We need to use our common sense and interpret the rules in light of the current migrant crisis.

“Family reunification was established back in 1976, at a time when there was little unemployment and people had no difficulty integrating into society. “Things have changed. France must suspend this right until the EU comes up with a solid immigration policy for all member states, and does more to protect its border.”

The Republic, he said, must be more demanding when dealing with migrants who come to France in a bid to be granted French citizenship, which allows them to claim state benefits.

He said: “A foreigner should only have access to social benefits after he has lived in the country for more than five years.

“And it should take 10, not five years to become a naturalised French citizen.”

Moreover, being French means having a “language, a history, and a way of life in common,” said Mr Sarkozy.

Nothing to do with DNA, of course.

Assimilated French Moslem (note the French flags)

If he’s really going to deport all of them that haven’t assimilated, that will be the majority, including third and fourth generation Arabs.

Ah, but I don’t think he’s talking about that, is he?

Marine doesn’t even talk about that.

Daily Express:

The United Kingdom should open its own centre on British soil to deal with migrants camped in Calais, Nicholas Sarkozy has demanded.

The former French President, who is attempting a political comeback, said Britain should let migrants currently camped out in Calais into the country.

It is estimated there are up to 9,000 migrants packed into squalid conditions inside the Calais camp known as The Jungle, with many hoping to make the crossing into Britain.

In the past two years the number of migrants in the camp has swelled with many making nightly attempts to reach Britain illegally through the Channel Tunnel.

Mr Sarkozy told a political rally in northern France: “I’m demanding the opening of a centre in Britain to deal with asylum seekers in Britain so that Britain can do the work that concerns them.

“The jungle should not be in Calais or anywhere else, because this is a republic and those with no rights to be here should return to their country.”

Mr Sarkozy said Britain should manage the asylum process, accepting those it wants on British territory and organising charters to remove those who are rejected.

Why on earth should it be the problem of the British to deal with “migrants” on your nation’s soil, Jew?

If you want them out, send in your military to round them up and send them home.

Or you could just send them to Germany. I’m sure Merkel wants them.

Sarkikezy has also vowed to make the burkini ban national law, following a high court overruling of municipal laws banning the disgusting abomination from local beaches.

The Guardian:

France’s former leader Nizolas Sarkozy says he’ll ban the burkini nationwide if re-elected as president next year. At his first rally for the elections on Thursday, Sarkozy commends both right- and left-wing mayors who have banned the burkini in their towns. The former conservative leader, who served as president from 2007 to 2012, says the ban is to preserve public order.

This is cuckery, of course. All it does is enrage the Moslems, and certainly doesn’t force them to assimilate.

On some level, it is funny, because it is like trolling them. But a national politician supporting it is doing it to hoax a plan to force-assimilate an unassimilable group, giving false hope to the stupid goyim that eventually these monkeys will start acting like human beings.

Just after announcing he’ll be returning to French politics, the sneaking rat Hungarian Jew Nicolas Sarkozy Tweeted his support for interracial breeding, insinuating that if French people have sex with members of their own race, it will destroy France.

He wrote “Le métissage enrichit les sociétés, la consanguinité les tue,” which, roughly translated, is “Race-mixing enriches society, consanguinity (breeding with your own people) destroys it.”

This is one of the more bold statements that any Jew has made thus far with regards to the topic of race-mixing.  Generally, Jews present the phenomenon of White people producing children with persons from the less-evolved races as positive, though I am not aware of another Jew having stated that a refusal to engage in race-mixing would destroy society.  (The closest thing I can think of is Jewish Harvard Professor Noel Ignatiev calling for the White race to be “abolished.”)

And what a bizarre position this is.  For untold thousands of years, White European people bred exclusively with their own, and during this time built the greatest civilizations this world has ever seen.  How is it that if White people breeding with Whites is a destructive practice, it enable the development of these productive and celebrated historical societies?

I don’t think we are supposed to be able to understand the statement.  It is simply meant as low-level propaganda for the liberal supporters of Sarkozy, who believe the solution to France’s racial integration problem is a breeding out of the White population.  And on some level, they are indeed correct, in a very sick sense.  If Whites refused to breed with their own people, instead breeding exclusively with the savage hordes, France would quickly become completely Islamic and racially low in nature, and thus the race problem would be solved.

However, this would be the true destruction of French society.  Their thousands of years of unique cultural development would be lost forever, France becoming indistinguishable from North Africa, a barbaric and backward, poverty-ridden Islamic hell.

Ex-President of France, Devil-faced Jew Nicolas Sarkozy has been arrested and placed under formal investigation for corruption.

BBC:

Ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been placed under formal investigation over alleged influence peddling.

He appeared before a judge in Paris late on Tuesday after 15 hours of questioning by anti-corruption police.

This is thought to be the first time a former French head of state has been held in police custody.

Mr Sarkozy’s lawyer, Thierry Herzog, and senior prosecutor Gilbert Azibert were also placed under formal investigation over the allegations.

There was no word on the questioning of a second prosecutor, Patrick Sassoust, who had also been in custody.

The allegation against Mr Sarkozy is that he sought insider information from a judge regarding an investigation into illegal campaign financing.

Mr Sarkozy denies any wrongdoing and is due to be interviewed live on French TV on Wednesday evening.

He has received support from several high-ranking party colleagues. Former PM Alain Juppe wrote on his Twitter feed: “I’m thinking in friendship of Nicolas Sarkozy: he is of course presumed innocent.”

President Francois Hollande also stressed the presumption of innocence, his spokesman said.

Taking in the “shock wave”, Le Figaro, the newspaper of choice for many French conservatives, asks if Nicolas Sarkozy is not being singled out for political reasons. Yves Threard suggests that French judges are seeking revenge for criticisms he made of the justice system while in office, when he famously described magistrates as indistinguishable “little peas”.

Writing in the centre-left daily Liberation, Eric Decouty argues that Mr Sarkozy must take responsibility for his actions if he wishes to return to politics. “Even if the former head of state has never made morality his chief virtue, he cannot scorn certain values essential to our democracy,” he says.

The French justice system may now be doing the “dirty work” of Mr Sarkozy’s own party, Patrice Chabanet suggests in an editorial for regional daily Le Journal de la Haute-Marne. Other figures in the party like former prime ministers Francois Fillon and Alain Juppe “want to turn the page of Sarkozyism”, he argues. Even if Mr Sarkozy emerges from his legal troubles exonerated of blame, the cost to his political career may be too great, he suggests.