French presidential candidate François Fillon is fighting for his political life after an anti-fraud investigation into payments made to his wife for an alleged fake job as a parliamentary assistant was extended to look at roles he gave his children.
Pressure on Fillon intensified after video footage emerged of his wife denying she had ever been his parliamentary assistant – contradicting his defence.
Until last week, Fillon, the candidate for the rightwing party Les Républicains (LR), had been considered a favourite to face off against the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen in the final round of the election in May. But he has dropped in the polls since prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation for possible misuse of public funds.
Who is running in the French election?
The final line-up is still unknown, but
Newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné has alleged that Fillon paid his wife, Penelope, who is British, about €830,000 (£700,000) of taxpayers’ money as his parliamentary assistant for more than a decade when he was an MP.
It is legal, and commonplace, in France for MPs to hire family members, as long as the person is genuinely employed. But investigators are seeking to establish whether Penelope Fillon, who allegedly did not have a parliamentary assistant’s security pass and had always stressed that she had no role in her husband’s political life, did in fact carry out the role she was paid for.
Fillon denies any wrongdoing and said his wife’s parliamentary job was real. But one of France’s main investigative news programmes, Envoyé Special, unearthed previously unseen footage of Penelope Fillon telling a journalist she had never worked for her husband. In the 2007 footage for the Sunday Telegraph, she told Kim Willsher, now a correspondent for the Guardian in Paris:“I have never actually been his (Fillon’s) assistant or anything like that.”
Penelope Fillon’s lawyer, Pierre Cornut-Gentille, told Agence France-Presse that isolated phrases should not be taken out of context and said his client have given investigators “all the details showing the existence of an actual job”.
The allegations that Fillon’s family could have used public funds to enrich themselves are deeply damaging for Fillon, who has campaigned as a sleaze-free economic reformer who would slash public spending and cut 500,000 public sector jobs.
On Thursday investigators widened their preliminary investigation to look at Fillon’s employment of two of his children – Marie and Charles – as assistants when he was serving in the French Senate. He told French TV last week that he had hired his children for their expertise as lawyers. But it emerged that they were in fact students at the time, and had not qualified as lawyers. They were paid €84,000 between them from public funds, the Canard Enchaîné alleged.
Fillon has brushed aside the allegations as a plot against him and repeatedly vowed not to quit as candidate. He said he would only step down if criminal charges were brought against him. But the preliminary investigation is likely to run for weeks, leaving his campaign in limbo.
In the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro, party stalwarts such as Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet signed a letter offering Fillon their “total support”. But there is a growing sense of despair among the party rank-and-file that a presidential election that LR thought was impossible to lose could now be slipping out of reach. A survey on Thursday showed 69% of French people wanted Fillon to drop his bid.
Some LR MPs fear that, whatever the outcome, Fillon is now an electoral liability who will not be able to defend his platform of slashing public spending.
“How can you defend a platform that asks everyone to make sacrifices, that tells people they have lived too well for decades and now must tighten their belts, and then have this?” Henri Guaino, an LR lawmaker from the Paris suburbs, who was not a Fillon ally, told French TV.
In private, some MPs said the accusations have had a devastating effect on their constituents. “People are stunned, sickened, terribly disheartened,” one MP told Reuters. “The risk is that he takes us all down with him.”
The party is in uncharted waters on the issue of how to replace Fillon if he is forced to stand aside. There is no time to organise another primary race and it is unclear how a party with deep internal divisions would organise a process to agree on a candidate. Officially the party is not yet looking for an alternative to replace Fillon, but cracks are beginning to show.
One MP said an open letter was being drawn up by some party members calling for Fillon to be replaced by Alain Juppé, the 71-year-old mayor of Bordeaux, who he beat in the final run-off for the party’s nomination last autumn.
Juppé has so far said he will not be a back-up option. The former president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Fillon has harshly criticised for being the subject of a number of legal investigations, was eliminated in the first round of the party’s selection process and has not commented.
Younger party figures such as François Baroin, a former finance minister under Sarkozy, and Xavier Bertrand, the head of the Hauts-de-France northern region, have been mooted as potential substitutes in the French media.
