Following Friday’s guilty verdict against former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe, France’s Le Monde has no doubt about the ruling’s wider political implications.
The paper concedes that Juppe was sentenced for his own role in the illegal funding of the RPR party in the 1980s and 1990s.
“But beyond the man,” it says, “it is a system that was condemned. A system from which Jacques Chirac – then RPR president and mayor of Paris – benefited.”