PARIS: French presidential hopeful Francois Fillon was fighting to keep his campaign alive on Thursday as a TV interview with his wife added fuel to a fake job scandal and some members of his party openly plotted to replace him.

One of France’s main investigative news programmes, Envoye Special, is set to air previously unseen footage on Thursday evening of Fillon’s Welsh-born wife Penelope talking to a journalist in 2007. Envoye Special presenter Elise Lucet said that “several interesting remarks” had been found in the footage, including that Penelope had never — contrary to recent revelations — acted as her husband’s assistant.

Penelope Fillon’s lawyer, Pierre Cornut-Gentille, insisted the remarks contained in an interview for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper had been “taken out of context.”

On Thursday, Fillon ploughed on with his campaign, visiting a village on the Belgian border, where he refused to answer questions on “Penelopegate” as the French media have dubbed it. Fillon, 62, has flatly denied the accusations that he used public money to pay his previously low-profile wife for a fictitious job. This week it emerged that he also had two of his children on the payroll, for an additional 84,000 euros.

His wife’s lawyer said on Thursday that Penelope had handed over “all the details proving the existence of a real job”. The accusations are highly damaging for Fillon, who won the Republicans nomination in November as a sleaze-free reformer who would slash France’s debt by cutting 500,000 civil servants’ jobs.

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2017