Police on Thursday raided the Paris home of French presidential candidate Francois Fillon over an alleged fake-job scandal, while a senior party colleague warned him he risked dragging his party “into an abyss.”
Fillon on Wednesday said that he is to be charged over allegations he paid his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros for fake parliamentary jobs, but he has vowed to continue his bid for power.
After searches at his parliamentary office last month, police raided his central Paris home as he visited winegrowers on the campaign trial in southern France.
The raid “finished several hours ago,” a source in Fillon’s team told reporters late on Thursday, confirming information first reported by Le Parisien newspaper.
Fillon was accused by Dominique de Villepin, another former premier from his Republicans party, of driving the party “into the abyss” with his insistence on running for the presidency.
“Going down this dead-end street is taking the state, our faith in democracy and its fellow travelers hostage,” De Villepin wrote in Le Figaro newspaper.
Fillon has called the charges against him “entirely calculated to stop me being a candidate for the presidential election” and has ruled out stepping aside.
However, defections from his team and calls from senior Republicans for former French prime minister Alain Juppe, 71, to replace him have underlined divisions in his camp.
“The French people back me,” Fillon said. “The base is holding.”
New polls suggest that Fillon is in third place and would win 19 to 20 percent in the first round of the election on April 23, behind En Marche party hopeful Emmanuel Macron and National Front party leader Marine Le Pen.
Thousands turned out to Fillon’s rally in the town of Nimes on Thursday evening and his calculation appears to be that he can close the small gap on his rivals in the remaining two months.
The top two from the first round proceed to a run-off on May 7, which Macron is shown as winning.
However, analysts warn against firm forecasts after a roller-coaster campaign so far.
Le Pen’s legal woes also deepened as the European Parliament lifted her immunity to allow her to be prosecuted for retweeting images of Islamic State atrocities.
The candidate also faces a separate parliamentary expenses investigation and a campaign financing probe in France — all of which she, like Fillon, denounces as a plot to thwart her.
The investigation in focus on Thursday concerns graphic pictures including that of a beheaded journalist that Le Pen tweeted in 2015.
They were addressed to a French television journalist who had likened her National Front party to the Islamic State group, leading police to open a probe into “the dissemination of violent images.”
“The thing about the judicial affairs for Marine le Pen and the National Front is that they are not about personal enrichment, while Francois Fillon’s family is directly implicated,” Stanford University’s Cecile Alduy told a conference this week.
Meanwhile, Macron promised a “strategy to make public life more ethical” as he unveiled his full program for the first time.
The 39-year-old said he would ban parliamentarians from employing relatives, bar candidates with criminal records from standing for office and increase the scrutiny of the expenses of members of parliament.
Speaking late on Thursday, he also said he would pull out of the election if he was charged “in the same way, in principle, a minister must leave the government if he is charged.”
“To be president is to be the guarantor of institutions — that is to say someone who guarantees the dignity of our public life,” he told France 2 television.
Macron founded his independent movement En Marche (On the Move) in April last year and has been the main beneficiary of Fillon’s woes.
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