Nicolas Sarkozy urged a proactive approach to the economic crisis linked to the Covid-19 while warning against any form of arrogance in a televised speech on Monday. “When the President of the Republic, whoever he is, in this case, Emmanuel Macron, goes to the end of an idea, a conviction, he is not wrong,” he said on TF1, referring to the willingness of the head of state to face the crisis “whatever the cost” and recalling the risks he had taken to manage the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

“It’s not because you’re willing that you succeed, but if you’re not willing, you have no chance of succeeding,” added the former head of state, who was invited for the launch of his new book, Le Temps des tempêtes.

When asked about Emmanuel Macron’s statements, which may have seemed “arrogant,” he replied: “Arrogance is a very serious flaw that I have tried to never have.” “These truths that were hammered out on television and radio, without being able to discuss them, people feel it is a great arrogance,” the former head of state lamented in a more general reply.

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“Today my duty is a duty to the country I led for five years. And I must no longer be in the political fight. But Jean Castex is a man of quality,” he said of the Prime Minister, his former deputy secretary-general at the Élysée Palace.

Gérald Darmanin, the Interior Minister facing a rape charge, “can count his friendship”, Nicolas Sarkozy said, arguing for the respect of the presumption of innocence without which “there is no democracy”. “Especially in a country like ours” which experienced periods such as “the Terror” during the Revolution, he pointed out, quoting a phrase from Louis Antoine de Saint-Just which said, “Prove your virtue or go to prison”.

He also said he was “calm and fighting” about the corruption trial in the so-called “wiretapping” case, in which he is due to appear at the end of November. In his book, published a year after the previous one which sold over 300,000 copies, Sarkozy looks back on the first two years of his five-year term, in 2007 and 2008.