PARIS (Reuters) - Pressure on French
presidential candidate Francois Fillon to quit the race mounted on Thursday as
some lawmakers in his own camp urged him to drop his scandal-tainted bid in
order to save the conservatives from defeat.
With opinion polls showing the conservatives
that their candidate may be fatally damaged, some senior members of The
Republicans urged him to pull out now to give the party time to find a good
replacement.
Fillon, 62, denied wrongdoing after Le Canard
Enchaine newspaper reported the former prime minister had paid his wife
hundreds of thousands of euros for work she may not have done.Falling poll ratings since then will benefit
far right leader Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker
running as an independent. A poll of voting intentions showed the Socialist
candidate, Benoit Hamon, also increased his share.
"I think our candidate must stop,"
Alain Houpert, a senator close to Fillon's former rival for the conservative
ticket, Nicolas Sarkozy, told Public Senat television on Wednesday. France 2 television said it would broadcast
later on Thursday extracts of a 2007 interview of Fillon's Welsh-born wife
Penelope telling British media that she had never worked as his assistant.
French financial investigators are also widening
their probe to include two of the Fillons' children, a source told Reuters. Fillon himself pressed on with campaigning in
the Ardennes region in northern France, telling journalists that he would
concentrate on "questions which are of interest to France". "I feel like someone who is being
attacked unjustly on all sides. But I am ready to defend myself," he said
when a few cries of "Resign!" rang out from a crowd.
French lawmakers are allowed to employ family
members, but the suggestion Penelope Fillon did no real work has damaged
Fillon's image, and could yet put him in court. Fillon has said the work was genuine and will
not stand down unless put under formal investigation. He held an emergency
meeting with party grandees on Wednesday in which he urged them to stick by him
for another two weeks the time he estimated a preliminary investigation would
take to run its course.
But some appeared unwilling to give him that
much time after one poll showed the hitherto favourite would be eliminated in
the first round of the election on April 23. Another survey showed 69 percent of people
wanted Fillon to drop his bid."We need to change tactics,
strategy," lawmaker Georges Fenech told RTL radio on Thursday. "We're
like the orchestra on the Titanic as it sinks," he said in an earlier
comment.
Another legislator, Philippe Gosselin, called
on former prime minister Alain Juppe, whom Fillon beat in a runoff for the
party nomination, to think of stepping in as an alternative. But in the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro,
party stalwarts such as former candidates Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie
Kosciusko-Morizet offered Fillon their "total support".
Aside from Juppe, other names being mentioned
are Francois Baroin, a former finance minister, Valerie Pecresse, who heads the
prosperous Ile de France region around Paris, and Xavier Bertrand who won a
notable victory against Le Pen in regional elections in 2015.
The scandal has heightened investor concerns
that National Front leader Le Pen could win and take France out of the euro and
the European Union. Opinion polls routinely show Le Pen making it
through to a second round, but being soundly defeated in the runoff vote by any
candidate be it Fillon or the centrist Macron. The uncertainty has increased state borrowing
costs, with the spread over German bond yields rising to an almost two-year
high.
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