The lack of interest over the issue shown by those in power is inversely proportional to the extent to which corruption now appears to be taking a deep hold in France. According to fresh official data, the number of offences involving dishonesty or breaches of probity – such as influence-peddling, unlawful conflict of interest, favouritism and outright corruption - recorded by the police and gendarmerie continue to rise, with an increase of 8.2% in 2024 compared with the previous year.
This rise, which matches the one recorded in 2023, is driven by a surge in the number of cases of corruption, which has almost doubled in the past eight years: from 167 offences recorded in completed investigations in 2016, the number in France climbed to 324 in 2024.
These figures feature in an official report produced by the Ministry of the Interior’s statistical service the Service statistique ministériel de la sécurité intérieure (SSMSI) and the anti-corruption body the Agence française anticorruption (AFA), and which was made public on April 24th. Since then it has attracted no public comment from a government whose interior and justice ministers, Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin respectively, have both stood by their old political mentors, former prime minister François Fillon and ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. This is despite the fact that each of the latter pair has been convicted in a corruption or misappropriation of public funds case.
In 2024, a total of 934 offences relating to breaches of probity or dishonesty were recorded, with increases across almost every category of wrongdoing. Once again there was a big jump in number of cases of outright corruption, an offence punishable by up to ten years in prison; these rose sharply from 278 in 2023 to the 324 cases reported in 2024. Yet, according to the report’s authors, the true scale of the phenomenon is still likely to be under-reported.
Indeed, the report notes that a crime survey conducted by the Ministry of the Interior, entitled 'Experience and Perceptions of Safety', found that “fewer than 1% of individuals who are victims of attempted bribery in a work setting report it to the police”. In the absence of a complaint, proceedings may still occur as a result of whistleblowing, official reports, or observations made by police or gendarmes during investigations into other matters.
This under-reporting is accentuated by the fact that, according to investigators and magistrates, “corruption, when encountered in files linked to drug trafficking, is rarely prosecuted due to the difficulty in proving it”, says the study. As a result, this may lead to an “underestimation of the scale of the problem based on data gathered solely from security services”, at the very time that warnings are mounting over the growing reach of criminal networks.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The second most common offence in terms of numbers is unlawful conflict of interest (an offence that punishes bias on the part of a public official), with 199 cases recorded in 2024. This is followed by misappropriation of public funds, with 168 cases in the same year. The rise in the number of all these offences is spread fairly evenly across the country, although some regions such as Corsica, France's overseas territories and the Côte d’Azur in the South of France report a higher rate of offences per head than the national average.
In a public sphere still dominated by older men, this group is overrepresented in the figures. While individuals over the age of 45 make up 46% of the general population, they account for 54% of those named in such proceedings. Some 94% of the offences are committed by people holding French nationality.
Lack of a national strategy
These figures have been published at a time when the fight against corruption in France finds itself in a strangely contradictory place. On the one hand, high-profile trials and convictions are stacking up, starting with that of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the first head of state in France's Fifth Republic to be found guilty of corruption, after the last of all his appeals in the so-called Bismuth or phonetapping case was rejected in December 2024.
In addition, he has been convicted on appeal in the so-called Bygmalion scandal concerning funding of his 2012 election campaign (he has since lodged a final appeal with the country's top court the Cour de Cassation) and stood trial from January to April this year in the case concerning alleged Libyan financing of his 2007 campaign, one of the largest suspected corruption scandals in the history of the Fifth Republic. The verdict in that case is expected in September.
Meanwhile, the courts have also handed down a conviction at first instance against the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) and its past presidential candidate Marine Le Pen over a scheme involving the misuse of public funds in the European Parliament; an appeal hearing is scheduled for early 2026.
But these major cases stand in stark contrast to the lack of political will to do anything about the issue. Having entered office on a pledge to “clean up public life”, Emmanuel Macron has since abandoned that promise entirely, even going so far as to openly support a special exemption for Nicolas Sarkozy to retain his Légion d’honneur award. This is despite the definitive nature of the ex-president's conviction, which should have led to the award being removed.
And though there have been repeated warnings from specialist investigators and magistrates, internal reports, plus alerts from non-governmental organisations, France still has scant investigative resources, a fact reflected in the country's sharp fall in the 2024 rankings of Transparency International.
Following the end of its first multi-year strategy (from 2020 to 2022), France's anti-corruption body, the Agence française anticorruption, has yet to put in place a new roadmap, a delay that seems to be of little concern to anyone. And when prime minister François Bayrou recently expressed his “unease” in response to a high-profile corruption case, it was only to criticise the fact that the judgement against Marine Le Pen made her immediately ineligible to stand for public office.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter