PARIS:- (AFP) French rightwing candidate
Francois Fillon battled to save his scandal-hit presidential bid on Wednesday
as grim new polling numbers and party colleagues increased pressure on him to
step aside. After a week of damaging revelations that the 62-year-old former
prime minister employed his family members in parliament, a new poll Wednesday
showed him crashing out of the election in April.
Fillon has been favourite to be France's next
leader since November when he clinched the nomination for the Republicans
party, but the survey suggested for the first time he would be defeated in the
first round of the election. The main beneficiary from his woes appears to be
Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old independent centrist who was seen advancing to
the second round in May to face far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
"We know where this affair comes from,
it comes from the government, it comes from the left," Fillon told
Republicans lawmakers in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, according to those
present. He pleaded with them to "hold out for two weeks" until a
judicial investigation into the allegedly fake parliamentary job of his
British-born wife Penelope had been completed.
Fillon has admitted to employing Penelope and
two of his children during his time in parliament, with the newspaper Le Canard
Enchaine reporting they earned pre-tax income of around 900,000 euros
($970,000).But Penelope is accused of having barely worked for her salary,
which reportedly reached 10,000 euros a month in 2007, leading to an
investigation into the possible misuse of public funds.
In addition, Penelope worked at a literary
review owned by a billionaire friend of her husband's where she allegedly
earned another 100,000 euros in 2012 and 2013. After investigators searched
parliament and interviewed Fillon and his wife at length this week, cracks are
starting to show in the increasingly anxious Republicans party.
"Fillon's dead. His DNA was probity.
Everything's falling apart," said one MP known to be close to former
president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Fillon defeated in the Republicans primary last
year.A member of his campaign team, Bruno Le Maire, admitted publicly that the
amount of money involved "is shocking for a lot of French people."
The former prime minister was mobbed by
reporters at a business fair later on Wednesday where he vowed to continue his
run for the presidency and to contest the allegations "to the end." The
claims are especially damaging for a devout Catholic, who has campaigned on his
sleaze-free record and promised to slash wasteful public spending.
The socially conservative father-of-five has
remained defiant throughout, painting the accusations as a plot,
"mudslinging" or even an "institutional coup" against him. For
the first time Wednesday he pointed the finger at outgoing Socialist President
Francois Hollande, whom he has described as "pathetic".
The new poll on Wednesday by the Elabe group
for the first round in April showed Le Pen on 26-27 percent, Macron as high as
23 percent and Fillon around 20 percent, a fall of between five and six points
since January.
Macron would be expected to beat Le Pen in a
second-round runoff to be held in May, but analysts caution against making
predictions after a series of electoral shocks in the West. Le Pen believes the
nationalist sentiment that led to Donald Trump being elected in the United
States and Britain voting for Brexit will also carry her to the French
presidency in what would be a profound shock for the continent.
But her National Front party is also
embroiled in its own expenses scandal over money from the European parliament. What
would happen if Fillon steps aside is still not clear. The party would have to
nominate a new candidate, either by a new primary contest, a vote by party
members, or possibly a nomination by the senior leadership.Supporters of Alain
Juppe, the 71-year-old centrist defeated by Fillon in the second round of the
Republicans primary, have begun asking him to consider stepping forward to
replace Fillon.
Ambitious former president Sarkozy, party
chairman until recently, came third in the primary race, but he faces a string
of legal cases of his own. Fillon says
that when he was an MP in Paris, his wife carried out constituency work but was
based at their 12th-century chateau near Le Mans in northern France.Penelope
has always been a low-key political wife known to prefer life with her children
and horses in the countryside than among the Parisian chattering classes.
0 Comments