Lawyers for the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy have said they will try to ensure he serves as little time in prison as possible, after he was sentenced to five years for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to get election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
"We're going to make sure that his incarceration will be as short as possible," Sarkozy's lawyer Jean-Michel Darrois told the BFMTV news channel on Friday, after he became the first French president obliged to go to jail.
Sarkozy, who was rightwing president from 2007 to 2012, has lodged an appeal against his conviction, but a special provision by judges means he must begin a jail term in the coming weeks while any appeal process goes ahead.
Henri Guaino, a Sarkozy ally who once served as his special adviser, told RTL radio Sarkozy's conviction was "a humiliation for the state and its institutions" and urged centrist president Emmanuel Macron to pardon Sarkozy so he could avoid prison.
Macron has not commented on the conviction and sentence.
Top figures in Sarkozy's rightwing Les Républicains party have sent messages of public support but, amid rising distrust of the political class, have stopped short of calling for any kind of pardon. The interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, who heads the party, expressed his "full support and friendship", adding he had "no doubt" Sarkozy will "devote all his energy" to defending himself on appeal.
Sarkozy, 70, has an appointment with the state prosecutor on 13 October when he will be told the date of his incarceration, which could be as early as October or November. French media speculated that he would probably be imprisoned in La Santé prison in the south of Paris, in an individual cell but mixing with other prisoners in the courtyard and common areas. A prison officer said typically prisoners at the facility were in their cells 23 hours a day.
Like any other prisoner, once Sarkozy enters jail, his lawyers will be able to petition for his release or for him to serve his term in a different way, such as with an electronic bracelet. That request would have to be heard by a judge.
In an editorial, the conservative French daily Le Figaro denounced the court ruling as "absurd and incomprehensible".
But other commentators pointed out that politicians of all parties and backgrounds had been sentenced in criminal courts in France, such the Socialist minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who had led François Hollande's drive for a more honest tax system but was convicted for tax fraud and secretly stashing his wealth in tax havens around the world.
The daily Le Monde said Sarkozy's conviction and sentence showed "nobody is above the law."
France's biggest magistrates' union said that for prison sentences of five years or over, more than 80% of French people who are convicted go straight to jail, so Sarkozy was not being treated any differently.
The public prosecutor - who in court had accused Sarkozy of entering into a "Faustian pact of corruption with one of the most unspeakable dictators of the last 30 years" to gain election funding from Gaddafi - had at the end of the trial recommended a seven-year prison sentence. Judges on Thursday instead sentenced Sarkozy to five years, but with a special provision that the jail term would start in the coming weeks, despite any appeals process.
On the left, Eva Joly, a former magistrate and green candidate for the presidency in 2012, said Sarkozy’s criticisms of the justice system outside the courtroom were “an attack on democracy” and a discourse of the kind made by the US president, Donald Trump.