'Penelope-gate' casts dark shadow over Fillon's France presidential prospects
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[quote]Investigation into possible misuse of public funds bodes ill for French candidate who cast himself as a sleaze-free, austere figure
It is the first major political scandal to hit the French presidential race and it could prove fatal.
The rightwing presidential candidate, François Fillon, who built his campaign on the carefully crafted image of a sleaze-free honourable country gentleman, is facing a preliminary investigation by state financial prosecutors into possible misuse of public funds. It came about after a newspaper alleged his wife was paid €500,000 (£430,000) out of parliamentary funds over eight years for an assistant’s job it claimed she never carried out.
In a tense appearance on French TV news on Thursday evening, Fillon denied the allegations of a fake job, and said he loved his wife, whose work had been “real” and “legal”. He claimed he was the target of dirty tricks and said he would only quit the presidential race if he was charged with an offence. That would be unlikely to happen before the elections in April and May because the preliminary investigation will probably take several months. Right now, Fillon has no intention of standing down. Polls last week showed him slightly behind the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen in the first round, with Emmanuel Macron, the maverick independent centrist, breathing down his neck.
Fillon promised to provide investigators with hard proof of his British wife’s work. Penelope Fillon has always said she prefers being at the couple’s 12th-century chateau in western France with their children and horses, rather than being involved in political life in Paris. She has said she doesn’t have a professional role and last year told a French journalist she had “never been involved in her husband’s political life”.
Even if Fillon does prove his wife carried out the job for which she was paid, the row, dubbed “Penelope-gate”, could still prove a long, slow poison for his campaign.
It is legal for French MPs to hire family members, as long as the person is genuinely employed. Indeed, the website Mediapart calculated that 52 wives, 28 sons and 32 daughters of MPs were employed using parliamentary funds in 2014, the first year that MPs had to publish their assistants’ names. On TV on Thursday, Fillon revealed that he had also hired two of his children using public funds for certain periods.
But the cosy system in which politicians can provide state jobs for family members is unlikely to endear the political class to an electorate increasingly wary of politicians’ special privileges. Penelope Fillon’s salary was extraordinarily high for a parliamentary assistant. At one point, when she was on the parliamentary assistant payroll for Fillon’s successor as MP, her salary reached €7,900 a month, the Canard Enchaîné newspaper claimed.
The issue is potentially so damaging because Fillon’s austerity plan for France hangs on his own reputation for righteousness. He has argued that his “blood, sweat and tears” drive to cut public spending and reduce the size of the public sector and welfare state, can only work if it is spearheaded by a rigorous, austere figure such as himself, who is “beyond reproach”. It will be much harder to convince a cash-strapped electorate of his controversial plans to slash 500,000 public-sector jobs and make state workers put in more hours for less pay if questions persist about his family’s privileged access to jobs paid for by their taxes.[/quote]
[url]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/27/penelope-gate-casts-dark-shadow-over-fillons-presidential-prospects[/url]
Marie Le Pen ever so closer.
[QUOTE=Tudd;51736353]
Marie Le Pen ever so closer.[/QUOTE]
a terrifying prospect.
[QUOTE=Tudd;51736353]Marie Le Pen ever so closer.[/QUOTE]
You know she has massive corruption scandals too and financial ties to foreign powers, right.
RIP France
once again an election becomes all about the lesser of two evils
[QUOTE=1239the;51736470]You know she has massive corruption scandals too and financial ties to foreign powers, right.[/QUOTE]
I think we've dug deep enough into this over many years, I believe Marine le pen cannot face charges for any of the alledged frauds, and everyone who has enough signatutes to run for president so far is, to some degree, already in cahoots with each their clique of foreign executives (with Macron being the most recent exemple)
Fillon is quite as bad as Marine Le Pen, and he's after her constituencies. Him being part of this shitshow of a presidential election is trouble for the FN, moreso than Juppé or Sarkozy would have been.
FN winning the second round of the election would be a huge upset.
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