Opinion: Will Trump’s conviction hurt him in the public eye? These countries give us a clue

Opinion by Chris Good

(CNN) — Editor’s Note: Chris Good is a producer at CNN, where he produces the daily global affairs newsletter Fareed’s Global Briefing. He has reported on and analyzed US politics, government and foreign policy for The Hill, The Atlantic, ABC News and The Economist Intelligence Unit. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Former President Donald Trump is a convict.

Thursday’s decision by a Manhattan jury—which ruled that Trump had directed hush-money payments to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels to sway the 2016 election in his favor—was a unique event in US history.

Around the world, it’s a different story. The criminal trial and conviction of (mostly former) national leaders has happened in stable, mature democracies, just as it has in former dictatorships. Some of those sagas offer insight into Trump’s. They show that a former leader might be down after a criminal conviction, but not necessarily out. The track record of convicted leaders shows just how risky it is to try to predict what will happen.

Examples are almost too numerous to list. In Argentina in 2022, then-Vice President and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was sentenced to six years in prison on corruption charges stemming from road contracts. (Given her age, it is not expected she will serve time.)

In February, former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz received an eight-month suspended sentence for lying to parliament. It was a precipitous downfall for a European conservative “wunderkind.” Kurz vowed to appeal. In 2017, South Korea impeached and later criminally convicted now-former President Park Geun-hye in a bizarre corruption scandal involving the influence of a friend and confidante.

The contexts overseas are all different—and all different from Trump’s. Still, questions cry out for asking: Are former leaders helped or hurt, politically, by their convictions? How do their supporters react? Does public faith in a country’s justice system erode, or is it strengthened?

The Washington, DC-based think tank Freedom House, which rates countries on freedom and democracy, says that of the countries it deems “free,” 43% have indicted current or former leaders since 2000. “That’s a pretty significant number, and so the prosecution of top leaders is not unusual in democracies,” Freedom House Executive Vice President Nicole Bibbins Sedaca told CNN. “That’s important for people to know, because quite often people have said this is turning the US into some sort of backwater or backwards country, but this is a sign of this system working, and it works in lots of other democracies.”

The experiences of three countries, France, Italy and Brazil, are particularly illustrative.

In one of the world’s oldest established democracies, France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted in 2021 of illegal campaign financing. He was handed a one-year prison sentence, half of which was suspended. He was able to serve the balance of his time outside of prison by wearing an ankle bracelet while under house arrest.

France “is a really good example” of how prosecuting a former leader can go well, Bibbins Sedaca said. “In the last 15 years they have prosecuted and convicted two former presidents and one former prime minister on corruption,” including Jacques Chirac in 2011 on charges related to 21 so-called “ghost jobs” during his tenure as mayor of Paris. Some voiced concerns that that would “show bias in the system, or … ruin the system, but the levels of public confidence in the system remained stable over the last decade,” Bibbins Sedaca said. Sarkozy, in fact, faces another case: Next year, he will stand trial on allegations (which he denies) that then-Libyan leader Moammar Gaddhafi illicitly helped fund his 2007 presidential campaign.

In Italy, the late brash, billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi faced numerous prosecutions. If the Stormy Daniels episode strikes you as lurid, consider that Berlusconi “was accused of paying 24 people, mostly young guests at his so-called Bunga Bunga parties, to provide false testimony in a previous trial where he was charged with paying for sex with a 17-year-old Moroccan nightclub dancer,” as Reuters wrote about that particular criminal case.

Berlusconi was found guilty in 2013 and received a seven-year sentence for the sex charges. The following year, he was acquitted on appeal in the underage-prostitution case; a 2023 acquittal overturned his witness-bribery conviction in connection to it.

Berlusconi also had been found guilty in 2012 of tax fraud in connection with his media firm’s purchase of TV rights in the 1990s and was sentenced to four years in prison, reduced to one year under a 2006 pardon law. He received a separate one-year sentence after a 2013 conviction for arranging for a newspaper run by his brother to publish leaked police wiretaps of a political rival. As he was over 70, Berlusconi was allowed to serve his time by doing community service, working at a hospice for Alzheimer’s patients near Milan.

None of that kept Berlusconi down. In Italy’s fractured political landscape, he mounted a comeback and resumed his position as a leading figure on the right. His Forza Italia party surged in 2017 mayoral elections. In 2018’s national elections, he led his party to a 14% showing in a victory for a right-leaning coalition that would then govern in partnership with the populist Five Star Movement.

On the Italian right, Berlusconi was gradually overshadowed by Matteo Salvini and eventually current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — but as recently as the 2022 election that propelled Meloni to power, Berlusconi was a prominent figure in the coalition she has helmed. Berlusconi died last year at 86.

Brazil offers another potential parallel to Trump, but with key differences — and an even more stunning comeback. After serving as president from 2003–2011, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was convicted in what was known as Lava Jato (or “car wash”) scheme, a series of kickback and bribery investigations that swept Latin America and shook Brazilian politics.

After a scandal emerged involving the state oil company Petrobras, Lula was convicted in 2017 of corruption and money laundering. He spent 580 days in prison, and supporters camped outside his cell. Lula was freed in 2019, and in 2021 his convictions were annulled over a jurisdictional issue.

It had also been revealed that the judge in Lula’s case had exchanged text messages with prosecutors — after that judge later had been made justice minister by conservative President Jair Bolsonaro. A free man, Lula ran for president in 2022 against Bolsonaro and won.

Part of Brazilian society saw Lula’s conviction “as something positive,” a sign that “the law applies to all,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, in an interview with CNN. Others pointed to procedural missteps and perceived the Lava Jato anti-corruption campaign as politically slanted, targeting the left. “And then there were those of the hardcore [Lula] supporters who immediately said this is totally politically motivated,” Stuenkel said.

Politicization is seen as a weakness of Brazil’s justice system, Stuenkel explained. Those who supported Lula’s initial conviction saw its later annulment as politically motivated. Still, the conviction “didn’t actually negatively affect Lula during his [2022] presidential campaign against Bolsonaro because by that time, centrist concerns about the threat that Bolsonaro posed to Brazilian democracy were greater than the fears of Lula coming back and allowing corruption to flourish yet again.” Because of Bolsonaro’s extremity as a right-wing populist, Stuenkel said, Lula “has been able to sort of recover in the eye of the public.”

Trump portrays himself as a political outsider. He would have the public believe that he is not the problem — it’s the system. Will the public agree? Opinions are split.

Initial polling after the Manhattan verdict, done by Reuters/Ipsos, found 14% of Republicans and 58% of independents said they would not vote for Trump if he had been convicted of a felony. Then again, Ariel Edwards-Levy of the CNN polling unit writes that “survey questions that ask voters to explain how their choices are affected by a news event … are notoriously difficult to answer or interpret, and commonly overstate the potential for movement in public opinion.” Views were polarized on partisan lines as to how the verdict reflected on the justice system and the legitimacy or political motivation of the verdict.

Trump might prove to be, like Berlusconi, seemingly impervious to scandal. Or he could be like Brazil’s Lula — his conviction might be seen differently by voters according to their degree of partisanship and their personal connection to him. Or he could be like Sarkozy and Chirac, his case merely a matter of the law.

Although a criminal conviction may appear likely to dent Trump’s political standing, one never knows. Elsewhere, former national leaders have come back — even after serving prison time. Trump’s supporters have forgiven many sins, Biblical and otherwise, seemingly because they believe he stands for them. To some, that political identity seems to have been more important than any of Trump’s provocations, falsities, ill-considered statements, or the bureaucratic chaos of his first administration.

As for public faith in the US justice system, Freedom House’s Bibbins Sedaca said an important factor is how other public figures talk about the verdict. The prosecution and conviction of a former president affords an opportunity for political leaders “across the spectrum” to affirm that “we live in democracies” where the law applies equally to everyone.

“That is really the social contract that exists,” Bibbins Sedaca said. “Political leaders can choose how they will speak about these institutions.”

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