Fillon vows to fight all the way as allies cut him loose
The legal attacks on François Fillon could just swing the presidential election for Marine Le Pen
THE conservative candidate François Fillon faced further calls to quit yesterday after vowing to pursue his campaign for the French presidency, despite a deepening investigation into whether he paid his wife more than €900,000 (£770,000) for a fictitious job.
Both Mr Fillon and his British wife Penelope face a summons later this month that could lead to them being charged.
Mr Fillon labelled the case an attempted “political assassination” that had been “biased from the start”.
But centrist Union des Démocrates et Indépendants allies said they were “suspending” support pending a decision on whether to pull out next week.
Catherine Vautrin, vice-president of his Les Républicains party in parliament, urged Mr Fillon to stand down in favour of “another candidate”.
Pierre Lellouche, a Right-wing Paris MP, meanwhile, said Mr Fillon had “reached a point of no return”, and called for the election to be put off until a replacement could be found.
Last Friday, three judges took over an investigation centred on whether Mrs Fillon was paid for an allegedly fictitious role as assistant to her husband and his successor in parliament. She had previously told the Telegraph: “I have never been his assistant.”
Speaking from the Paris headquarters of his centre-Right party yesterday, Mr Fillon confirmed he had been sum- moned on Mar 15 in view of being placed under formal investigation – one step short of being charged.
Judicial sources said that Welshborn Mrs Fillon has also been summoned. Le Monde said she would be questioned on March 18.
Despite previously pledging to stand down if charged, Mr Fillon said: “I won’t surrender. I won’t give in. I won’t withdraw, I will go all the way. Yes I will be presidential candidate.”
Denying he had misused and misappropriated public funds or peddled influence, Mr Fillon claimed that the investigation had been “biased against me from the start”, and that it was unprecedented for judges to summon someone for charges so soon after receiving the dossier of the case.
Until last week, a financial prosecutor was handling the Fillon inquiry. The magistrates now handling the case have more powers to investigate, including tapping phones or placing suspects under house arrest.
Mr Fillon made it clear he would plough on with his campaign. “Only universal suffrage and not a biased probe against me can decide who will be the next French president,” he said.
His attack on judicial impartiality prompted President François Hollande to respond: “Being a presidential candidate doesn’t authorise you to cast suspicion on the work of police and judges ... or to make extremely grave accusations against the justice system.”
It was a discreet lunch on June 24 2014 at Ledoyen, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, between François Fillon, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former PM, and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, President François Hollande’s current chief of staff. Fillon was worried that his former boss might make a successful comeback. “You have to get him,” he told Jouyet, an old friend. “Hit him harder, faster.”
The story was told by two Le Monde journalists, who successfully won a libel case against Fillon when he disputed their account. Sarkozy, who’d been repeatedly investigated by magistrates on a series of alleged corruption scandals, was facing yet another one, over campaign finance. (He’s since been cleared of all charges.)
Fillon, like most political observers, had no doubt of the judges’ political motivations in a country where those judges are civil servants. He also knew that Jouyet and Hollande kept a close watch on the cases, regularly briefed directly – at times daily – by the Justice Minister’s staff. Intent on getting the best shot at the presidency in 2017, he wanted the judges to nail Sarkozy for good.
Now Fillon’s presidential run stands a good chance of being scuppered by a judicial inquiry into the plum, and possibly fictitious, jobs he gave his wife and children as his parliamentary assistants. Irony aside, this tale illustrates the poisonous side of French political life. Yesterday, Fillon announced that he and his Welsh-born wife Penelope have been summonsed by an investigating magistrate, in all likelihood to be placed under formal investigation on March 15.
To outside observers, Fillon’s vow to fight on is incomprehensible. To his core voters, though, his cry that he is being “politically assassinated” is believable. They point out the exquisite timing of the original revelations, as well as the incredible speed with which the wheels of French justice started grinding.
Four weeks ago, the political satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné revealed that Mrs Fillon had received more than half a million euros over 12 years, without ever being seen in the corridors of the Assemblée Nationale. Le Canard is available on Tuesday night, and out in news kiosks on Wednesdays.
That very day, two investigative magistrates launched an official inquiry, prompting questions of how they had even found clerks to work overnight on their paperwork. Subsequent accusations about Fillon’s children have followed in a drip-drip-drip every Wednesday, accompanied by new judicial lines of inquiry, while the public was shocked at the sums involved at a time of mass unemployment, even though the jobs, if not fictitious, would be legal.
That French judges have a political bent is no secret. A France 3 TV team once filmed a wall of pictures and caricatures of mostly right-wing personalities, including Sarkozy, headlined “Le Mur des Cons” (“The Wall of Imbeciles”) at the headquarters of their main union, Syndicat National de la Magistrature.
The effect of all this on Fillon’s poll numbers was disastrous. His clear lead vanished overnight. Having beaten yesterday’s men – his old boss Sarkozy, as well as Alain Juppé – in the Republican primary in December (while the Socialists self-destructed à la Corbyn), he was set to come second to Marine Le Pen in the first round and trounce her easily in the runoff.
Now he’s been overtaken by Emmanuel Macron, President Hollande’s maverick former economy minister, an untried novice with great charisma making an unprecedented independent run.
Macron’s spokesmen are already appealing to Fillon’s voters. Their message is clear: Fillon is soiled goods. He might plod on, but an ignominious end is near. The interviewer didn’t contradict him.
Whether the Fillon affair comes as a complete surprise or not to Emmanuel Macron, his belief is that it works to his benefit. Others are not so sure. Fillon has been raging against the judges, but also the media, changing the tenor of what had until then been a civilised race into the angry tones heard during the campaign that elected Donald Trump. And perhaps the person who might gain the most from this latest injection of poison into French politics is Marine Le Pen.