Explainer | Not just Trump: these leaders also got into legal trouble

There is a long history of leaders prosecuted before, during and after holding power

Here are some notable cases, from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma

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Donald Trump has has racked up more legal problems than all of his 43 predecessors combined. Photo: AP

Published: 12:52pm, 7 Aug 2023

Former US president Donald Trump appeared in a Washington courtroom last week on his third set of criminal charges since leaving office, an unprecedented event in the US but one that brings the nation in line with the rest of the world.

Despite protests from Trump allies that prosecutions of politicians are a hallmark of underdeveloped “banana republics”, they’ve also happened in advanced democracies such as France and Germany. Here’s a look.

Europe

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy

Sarkozy was sentenced in 2021 to a one-year prison term for helping a magistrate land a prestigious job in return for information about a legal investigation. Although the conservative leader lost his appeal, the sentence hasn’t been carried out. In a separate case, Sarkozy was found guilty of deliberately breaking campaign-finance rules in his failed 2012 re-election bid. He was handed a one-year sentence, but that’s suspended while he appeals.

Former French president Jacques Chirac

In 2011, Chirac became the first French head of state in the modern era to be convicted of a crime after leaving office. The late centre-right leader, who was too sick to attend court, was found guilty of misusing Paris city funds when he was mayor of the capital, and convicted to a two-year suspended term.

Silvio Berlusconi in 2022. File photo: AP

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl

Kohl faced allegations of corruption and illegal party financing shortly after the conservative bloc lost the 1998 election against the Social Democrats. Prosecutors investigated Kohl for over a year but finally decided in 2001 to drop the case under the condition that the former chancellor pay a stiff fine, which he did.

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi

Berlusconi, by his own reckoning, faced more than 100 probes and trials related to tax fraud, bribery and unlawful sex, among other allegations, during his political career. Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister won decades of acquittals, but after a 2013 tax fraud conviction stuck, he lost his Senate seat and was banned from holding public office. True to form, he still pulled off a comeback of sorts in 2022, when he was allowed to run for office again and reelected to parliament.

Middle East

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Netanyahu, Israel’s first active prime minister to stand trial, faces charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Prosecutors allege the country’s longest-serving premier abused his position to illicitly accept – and at times demand – fine wines and expensive cigars from billionaire friends. They also maintain he undermined the integrity of his office to win favourable media coverage. Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing.