French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

Something really scary in France right now is that you can see really clearly how most mainstream media are used for propaganda.

Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a great men that served France and so should not be treated like everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the judgement was fake.

Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...

But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

This is hopelessly naive. Heads of state should not be prosecuted in democracies. It sets a bad precedent and there is no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state. There are too many examples in history of abusive lawfare practices. Better not to nitpick about "crimes" in such cases and let the man disappear from the stage. Aggressive prosecutions only increase the likelihood he'll try to mount a political comeback.

He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.

That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrades confidence in the law for the rest of us. To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law. It is also the case that trying to constrain political figures using the law is anti-democratic. If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy. The legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically.

Not only is it a category error, it is undesireable. Let them fight it out in the special realm of politics and leave our legal systems alone so we can enjoy their benefits.

This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue without legal consequence.