Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the most divisive figures in French politics, calmly took to the podium to accept defeat, vowing to spend less time on the “passions of public life” after France humiliatingly rejected his attempt to run again as the right’s candidate for next year’s presidential election.



His thwarted bid to reconquer the French presidency and avenge his 2012 defeat by the Socialist François Hollande had been driven by a lifelong addiction to elections and a conviction that he could read the public mood. He once said of politics that “you have to withdraw the needle slowly” but he never managed to kick the habit. Now, aged 62 and after 40 years in politics, he might have to finally bow out.

During the right’s primary race, Sarkozy ran a ferociously hard-line campaign on French national identity, stealing the mantle of the far-right and targeting Muslims and minorities with proposals such as banning the hijab from universities and burkinis from the nation’s beaches.

His divisive and extreme approach will leave its mark on the rest of the presidential campaign in the run-up next May’s vote.

Sarkozy had already veered to the far-right during his failed re-election bid in 2012, convinced he lost that election because he didn’t go quite far-right enough.

This time, he went all out – saying that France’s identity and unity was threatened, targeting Islam and immigrants, promising to limit the French nationality rights of children born of foreign parents, saying that the only true ancestors of France were the Gauls, insisting that children who don’t eat pork should lose their special school dinner options and instead eat chips. Despite having supported Hillary Clinton in the US election, Sarkozy quickly turned his attentions to a victorious Donald Trump, attempting to style himself as a similar anti-elite figure and promising to rail against the politically correct.



The former French president failed to win the right’s nomination largely because of his enduringly unpopular personality after five years in power between 2007 and 2012. A very large majority of French voters on both the left and right clearly didn’t want to see him in power again.

François Hollande succeeded Sarkozy as French president in 2012. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

But his vehement appropriation of the ideas of the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen have only served to give her more credibility and legitimacy. Le Pen will benefit from that for the rest of the campaign. She is easily tipped to make it through to the final round of next year’s presidential race.



It remains to be seen what Sarkozy does next. In 2014, two years after he first promised to retire from politics, he returned to lead the rightwing Les Républicains party, which he renamed, in order to position himself as the right’s natural candidate for next year’s presidential race.

His primary campaign in recent months was shaken when he was forced to protest his innocence in the face of a series of legal investigations. The French state prosecutor recommended he should should face a criminal trial over alleged illegal campaign funding over the vast, costly stadium rallies of his failed reelection campaign in 2012.

Then a French-Lebanese businessman this month publicly repeated claims that the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi gave €50m (£43m) to fund Nicolas Sarkozy’s successful 2007 campaign for the French presidency. The businessman said he personally handed over cases stuffed with Libyan cash to Sarkozy and his chief of staff. Sarkozy denied the charges outright but lost his cool in the last TV debate calling a question over the case “disgraceful”.

France knows better than to presume Sarkozy will now retire. He is still angered at criticism of his five years in power, which were dominated by the 2008 financial crisis and its fallout. He claims that, while in office, he “saved Europe, if not the world, from a major crisis”.

But this time he said he felt “no bitterness, no sadness” and simply wished France “good luck”.