It has been a crazy week for politics in France, too. No immigration ban resulting in global protests or firing of an attorney general – but the impressive fall from grace of François Fillon, the centre-right Républicain presidential candidate whom everyone thought was the best man to defeat Le Pen.
The weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné revealed last week that Fillon’s wife, Penelope, had been employed as a parliamentary assistant between 2005 and 2007, a job for which no trace could be found and for which she has been paid €830,000. Further media investigation found that Fillon had also paid his children, then still students, about €84,000 over two years to work as his assistants. Penelope is also suspected to have been paid €100,000 for a literary consultant gig at a magazine owned by a friend of her husband. François Fillon himself is suspected of embezzlement of funds when he was senator, and Mediapart reported this morning that he never declared his earnings as a senior advisor for the company Ricol Lasteyrie (worth €200,000 over four years). The police have searched Fillon’s parliamentary office and a preliminary inquiry has been opened.
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