Bruno Retailleau has made "honesty" his political mantra and a campaign slogan to rally support for his party. "The right I want is one that first and foremost defends the France of honest people," the leader of Les Républicains (LR) has repeated since June, when the slogan was launched. But LR may now find it more difficult to defend this motto after the latest conviction of Nicolas Sarkozy, France's last right-wing president, whose term was from 2007 to 2012.

Several LR leaders condemned Sarkozy's sentence to five years in prison by a Paris court on Thursday, September 25, for criminal conspiracy in the alleged Libyan funding of his 2007 presidential campaign. The court said the sentence was to be applied even if he appeals, meaning he will be incarcerated.

"This unprecedented treatment, for which there is no justification, says everything about this political verdict," lamented MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, LR's number two, in a post on X. "If they truly believed in their sentence, what did the judges have to fear from waiting for an appeal decision?" As with Marine Le Pen's embezzlement conviction, it is the immediate effectiveness of the sentence that some politicians are criticizing.

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