Pressure grows on France’s Fillon to pull out of race as MPs break ranks
Lawmakers in the Republicans party urge the presidential candidate to quit race amid a fake jobs scandal involving Fillon’s family
Pressure on French presidential candidate Francois Fillon to pull out of the election race grew on Thursday as some lawmakers in his own camp urged him to abandon his bid in the face of a fake work scandal to save the conservatives from defeat.
“I think our candidate must stop,” Alain Houpert, a conservative senator close to Fillon’s former rival for the presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, told Public Senat television late on Wednesday.
Fillon held an emergency meeting with party bigwigs on Wednesday in which he urged them to stick by him for another two weeks – the time he estimated an official preliminary investigation would take to run its course.
But some in his own camp appeared unwilling to allow him that much time, after an opinion poll showed Fillon, hitherto the front runner in the election, would be eliminated from its crucial run=off.