(Bloomberg) -- The pressure is building on Francois Fillon.
After more than a week trying to fend off reports he handed family members unjustified public salaries, some lawmakers from within his Republican party are starting to signal his presidential bid may be over, even as others rally to his support.
Fillon on Wednesday appealed to his parliamentary group to give him two weeks to get his campaign back on track and has insisted he did nothing wrong. But with less than three months to go before the first round of voting, the party is running short of time to find a replacement candidate if Fillon is forced from the race.
Francois Fillon
“How can you defend a platform that asks everyone to make sacrifices, that tells people they have lived too well for decades and now must tighten their belts, and then have this?” Henri Guaino, a Republican lawmaker from the Paris suburbs, said Thursday on France2. “Yes, he won the primary, but would they have voted that way if they'd known?”
At least five other Republican lawmakers have publicly questioned Fillon's candidacy since Le Canard Enchaine published a second wave of revelations about his family's affairs on Tuesday night. Le Monde's front page on Wednesday asked: “Can Francois Fillon Hang On?” while other media speculated on what the party's Plan B might be.
“I will be the candidate,” Fillon told reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “When one chooses to be candidate in the presidential election, one also has to face the attacks.” He said the 4.4 million people who voted in November's primary give him the right to continue, despite the flak he's facing. Fillon won the primary with 67 percent of the vote.
For an explainer on the Fillon scandal, click here
A survey Thursday showed 58 percent of supporters of Fillon's Republicans think he should stay on as candidate. A broader group of voters in the center and center-right was split 50-50, while in the electorate as a whole, only 31 percent thought he should stay, according to the online poll of 946 people by Harris Interactive carried out Feb. 1.
“We are all sinking like the orchestra on the Titanic,” Georges Fenech, a Republican lawmaker who voted against Fillon in the primary campaign, said on LCI television, calling on the candidate to put the party's interests first. “Fillon can't ask us to wait for the end of the investigation, we are just a few weeks from the presidential election.”
Republicans' Dilemma
For the party leadership, there is no precedent for how to get out of their fix. A major party nominee has never dropped out this close to an election and last year's selection process was the first time the group has held a primary. The election timetable gives them little time to organize another vote and any replacement would have to complete his registration by March 17. A special college of party executives could pick a new candidate, Le Monde said.
Fillon supporters have refused to even discuss the idea of a replacement. “We must keep our nerve,” Eric Ciotti, a lawmaker from the south of France, said on France Info. “We will come out of this test united behind Francois Fillon.”
French prosecutors last week started a preliminary criminal investigation into reports that Fillon's wife Penelope earned a public salary as a parliamentary assistant without actually doing any work. Le Canard Enchaine said Tuesday that Penelope and two of the couple's children earned morning than 1 million euros ($1.1 million) over more than a decade as parliamentary aides and from Penelope's contributions to a magazine.
Potential Substitutes
Fillon has said that if prosecutors decide to start a full probe he'll pull out of the race, though it's unclear who would stand in his place on the Republican ticket should that happen.
Alain Juppe, who finished second to Fillon in the primary, has said he isn't ready to mount a campaign, though he hasn't fully ruled it out. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was eliminated in the first round of the party's selection process and hasn't commented either way. Francois Baroin, a former finance minister under Sarkozy, and Xavier Bertrand, the head of the North region, have been tipped as potential substitutes in the French media.
Fillon had been the establishment's leading candidate to stop nationalist Marine Le Pen's populist campaign to win the presidency and lead France out of the euro. He was the surprise winner of the Republican primary, with his boast that that he had the irreproachable integrity required to lead the country helping propel him from a third place in opinion polls.
After leading in polls after his primary victory, Fillon slipped to third this week in an Elabe survey. More than three quarters of French voters were unconvinced by his explanations of the jobs for his family, a separate poll showed.
--With assistance from Alexandre Boksenbaum-Granier Gregory Viscusi and Angeline Benoit To contact the reporter on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Ben Sills, Zoe Schneeweiss
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