Criminal probes adding intrigue to fiery French election season

It sounded like a great line at the time.

"Can you imagine General de Gaulle under criminal investigation?"

François Fillon was the man who uttered it, invoking France's foremost resistance hero who later founded and led the Fifth French Republic for 11 years.

Charles de Gaulle was morally impeccable.

Fillon, a former French prime minister, used the quip last August against his main opponents in the Républicains party primary to choose their candidate for the French presidency.

His two rivals at the time, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and former prime minister Alain Juppé, had both been under criminal investigation for using illegal political slush funds. Juppé was even convicted in 2004 and given a suspended sentence.

Fillon's great line became a killer line. It toppled Juppé from his perch as the right-wing frontrunner. It also saw off Sarkozy.

But Fillon himself faces a criminal investigation by examining magistrates, which under French law is just short of a formal indictment for a crime.

The irony is bitter for him. He chose to announce the news himself.

He also chose to announce Wednesday that he would not withdraw from the presidential race, which takes place in two stages at the end of April and the beginning of May.

This has created the unprecedented spectacle of two of the three leading presidential candidates in the French polls facing investigation and possible charges just before or after the election.

A question of honour

Fillon's possible crime was the subject of a scoop in January by the muckraking weekly Le Canard Enchainé. He put his Welsh wife, Penelope, on his office payroll for years when he was an MP, yet there is apparently no evidence that she ever did any work. Over the years, she was paid more than $1.4 million US.

If it is proven that she never did any work, that would amount to defrauding the state.

Fillon doesn't see it that way. He says he's an honourable man.

He has snarled like a wounded animal and talked of "political assassination," and that "our law-based state has been systematically violated." He lobbed a verbal grenade at the Socialist government, saying it was fomenting a "quasi civil war" by encouraging police and judges to pursue him.

He is not the only presidential candidate having problems with the French judiciary.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, is the object of police investigations for her activities at the European parliament, where she is a member.

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European parliament officials say she and her party owe the parliament almost $500,000 for what amounts to fictitious jobs. They say Le Pen named party workers and even her bodyguard as European parliamentary assistants merely to collect their salaries to run political campaigns in France.

French police are now investigating. Le Pen's chief of staff was even arrested and questioned before being released.

(The third major candidate, Emmanuel Macron, leader of the centre-left movement En Marche!, appears to have no police pursuing him for anything.)

'A government of judges'

All of this has created a poisonous atmosphere. Fillon wasn't the only candidate hurling furious insults at judges and government officials. Le Pen was far more ferocious and insidious.

In a Feb. 26 speech in the city of Nantes, standing in front of a backdrop with the words "In the Name of the People," Le Pen warned of "a government of judges."

"Magistrates are there to apply the law," she said. "Not to invent it or to thwart the will of the people." That is, her people.

Then she gave a thinly based warning to French civil servants that her party would root out enemies if she won.

"In a few weeks, the people in power will be swept aside by the election. But the civil servants will have to take responsibility for these illegal methods… The state we want will be patriotic."

Her actions were equally defiant. Two days earlier, she had refused to be interviewed by police in connection with the European parliament investigation.

That, too, is unprecedented.

Le Pen's bomb-throwing rhetoric may be a result of her study of Donald Trump's tactics in the U.S. presidential campaign.

She even flew to New York in the wake of his victory, hoping for an audience. But she was left sitting in the lobby of Trump Tower without a word with Trump himself.

He chose instead to meet Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party and a prime mover behind the Brexit campaign to leave the European Union.

Fillon's other problem

Le Pen's position in the polls seems much stronger than that of Fillon, who has steadily slid into third place. Whatever Le Pen says or does, surveys show one-quarter of the French electorate is ready to vote for her. That would get her into the second runoff round, where the top two candidates compete.

Fillon, despite his own defiance, has a far bigger problem, thanks again to a killer line he uttered.

On Jan. 26, on national television, he gave his word he would step aside if he faced criminal investigation. On March 1, he broke that promise. His top adviser, Bruno Lemaire — himself a former minister and a candidate for the presidential nomination — promptly quit Fillon's campaign.

The final date for submitting presidential candidacies, each one signed by 500 elected officials (from mayors to ministers), is March 15.

The betting now is that Fillon won't be submitting his.