Fillon warns France could face Greece’s fate

BIGUGLIA, Corsica: Conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon warned in Corsica on Saturday that France faced the same fate as debtridden Greece, deliberately reviving the “failing state” controversy he stoked on the Mediterranean island 10 years ago.

“I repeat what I said here in Corsica in 2007. We are a failing state... We have a debt that forces us to seek billions of euros each day on international markets,” Fillon told political supporters in the island.

“France today is a country which can fall next to Spain. Portugal, Italy, even one day Greece”, he added.

Fillon has based his campaign on the need to rein in spending and cut France’s deficit, pledging 100 billion euros of spending cuts and 500,000 public sector job cuts, proposals that are tougher than those of any other mainstream candidate.

It was in Corsica in September 2007, as prime minister under the newly-elected president Nicolas Sarkozy, that Fillon sparked a political storm by saying he was at the head of a failing state.

“I am the head of a state that is failing on the financial front. I am at the head of a state that for 15 years has been running a huge deficit,” he said at the time.

“I am at the head of state that has not voted through a balanced budget in 25 years. That cannot continue.”

Although Sarkozy’s government was only a few months old then, it had taken over the reins from Jacques Chirac, a fellow conservative who had ruled for two terms since 1995.

Fillon’s criticism was by far the strongest of the financial performance of the Chirac era to have come from the new government at that point.