Nicolas Sarkozy to be the first former EU head of state to go to prison

Nicolas Sarkozy will become the first former head of state from the EU to serve time in prison following his sentencing to five years. The former French president, who held office from 2007 to 2012, will learn the details of his incarceration on Monday after being convicted on September 25 for conspiracy. He was found guilty of allowing his closest associates to solicit illegal financing from Muammar Gaddafi's Libya for his successful 2007 presidential campaign. Despite appealing the conviction, he will be imprisoned due to a provisional detention order issued against him.

No other former EU head of state has been imprisoned after their term. This observation only includes leaders who were in power while their countries were members of the EU or its predecessors (such as the European Coal and Steel Community). Heads of government are not considered in this count.

However, some EU countries had former heads of state imprisoned before joining the Union, like Greece and Cyprus. Georgios Papadopoulos, the former strongman of the colonels' dictatorship (1967-1974), was sentenced to death in 1975 for high treason, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment until his death in 1999.

In Cyprus, Níkos Sampson, a brief president in 1974 during a coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1976, serving less than 10.

In Bulgaria, former communist dictator Todor Jivkov (1954-1989) avoided prison. He was sentenced in 1992 to seven years for embezzlement and abuse of power but was instead placed under house arrest.

Former French President Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) was only given a suspended sentence in 2011 for the fictitious employment scandal from his time as mayor of Paris.

Other EU member state leaders were imprisoned prior to their rise to power as political opponents, including Václav Havel (Czech Republic), Lech Wałęsa (Poland), Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (Romania), Éamon de Valera (Ireland), and Franjo Tuđman (Croatia), all of whom led their countries before joining the Union.

Franjo Tuđman, a key figure in his country's independence and president from 1990 to 1999, could have returned to prison after his term. He died before any charges were brought against him, but the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later indicated that he would have been charged with war crimes had he been alive, due to his actions during the Bosnian War (1992-1995).