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Sarkozy, charged with the alleged Libyan funding of his campaign- Hollande: “If I had introduced myself, Macron would not be president; it would be Le Pen or Fillon ”
The echoes of the fall of former French Prime Minister François Fillon, a favorite candidate in the presidential elections of spring 2017, have not gone out in France. Disclosures about his wife's pay for unjustified jobs for decades ruined his political career. And they accelerated the implosion of Los Republicanos (LR), the party of the old conservative right.
The trial of Fillon and his wife, Penelope Clarke, will begin this Wednesday, after being postponed on Monday by a lawyer strike. Both, along with their collaborator Marc Joulaud, are exposed to sentences of up to ten years in prison and large fines.
The defendant has promised to provide evidence that, in effect, his wife worked for him while he was a deputy of his fief in the department of Sarthe, and for Joulaud between 2002 and 2012, his substitute in the National Assembly when he was minister and prime minister.
According to the accusation, Penelope Clarke, as well as the children of both, collected from the funds allocated to the deputies to remunerate their employees without offering in return any labor compensation. They are criticized for the diversion of more than one million euros in public money between 1998 and 2013. The Fillon are also accused of another possible fictitious use of it, between 2012 and 2013, in the literary magazine Revue des deux mondes , owned by the businessman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. In exchange he charged 135,000 euros.
The case broke out on January 25, 2017, when the weekly Le Canard Enchaîné revealed the charges. The Republican candidate, who combined liberal proposals in economic and conservative morals, was the undisputed favorite to conquer the Elysee Palace. He had defeated a couple of heavyweights a few months earlier in the game, former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Alain Juppé.
In the LR primary campaign, and to attack his former boss and rival, Sarkozy, indicted in several legal proceedings, Fillon said it was unimaginable for a candidate for president of the Republic to find himself in such a situation. "Who imagines the accused General de Gaulle?" Said the former prime minister, who also presented himself as an austere man in contrast to his rival, habitual in the magazines of the heart and prone to luxury and ostentation.
A few weeks after the revelations of Le Canard Enchaîné , Fillon was charged. And his attachment to an elevated life train came to light. Another case broke out in the meantime: the gift to Fillon, by Robert Bourgi, a businessman friend of Sarkozy, of suits for a total value of about 13,000 euros.
Fillon, despite having promised that he would resign in case of imputation, kept the candidacy. Nor did he qualify for the second round. Emmanuel Macron, the main beneficiary of the earthquake, ended up defeating the candidate of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen. Maybe he wouldn't be president without that scandal.
Today Fillon, irrelevant in public life, wants to prove that he was not a criminal but, at most, a politician from another time, when greater permissiveness prevailed in the face of now unacceptable practices. But the effects of its fall and the fratricidal struggles of those years survive. His party does not lift his head. Some of its leaders have joined the ranks of Macron. Sarkozy has not settled all his accounts with justice. The Fillon process is also the trial of an era.
