It is the first major political scandal to hit the French presidential race and it could prove fatal.

The rightwing presidential candidate, François Fillon, who built his campaign on the carefully crafted image of a sleaze-free honourable country gentleman, is facing a preliminary investigation by state financial prosecutors into possible misuse of public funds. It came about after a newspaper alleged his wife was paid €500,000 (£430,000) out of parliamentary funds over eight years for an assistant’s job it claimed she never carried out.

In a tense appearance on French TV news on Thursday evening, Fillon denied the allegations of a fake job, and said he loved his wife, whose work had been “real” and “legal”. He claimed he was the target of dirty tricks and said he would only quit the presidential race if he was charged with an offence. That would be unlikely to happen before the elections in April and May because the preliminary investigation will probably take several months. Right now, Fillon has no intention of standing down. Polls last week showed him slightly behind the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen in the first round, with Emmanuel Macron, the maverick independent centrist, breathing down his neck.

Fillon promised to provide investigators with hard proof of his British wife’s work. Penelope Fillon has always said she prefers being at the couple’s 12th-century chateau in western France with their children and horses, rather than being involved in political life in Paris. She has said she doesn’t have a professional role and last year told a French journalist she had “never been involved in her husband’s political life”.

Even if Fillon does prove his wife carried out the job for which she was paid, the row, dubbed “Penelopegate”, could still prove a long, slow poison for his campaign.

It is legal for French MPs to hire family members, as long as the person is genuinely employed. Indeed, the website Mediapart calculated that 52 wives, 28 sons and 32 daughters of MPs were employed using parliamentary funds in 2014, the first year that MPs had to publish their assistants’ names. On TV on Thursday, Fillon revealed that he had also hired two of his children using public funds for certain periods.

But the cosy system in which politicians can provide state jobs for family members is unlikely to endear the political class to an electorate increasingly wary of politicians’ special privileges. Penelope Fillon’s salary was extraordinarily high for a parliamentary assistant. At one point, when she was on the parliamentary assistant payroll for Fillon’s successor as MP, her salary reached €7,900 a month, the Canard Enchaîné newspaper claimed.

The issue is potentially so damaging because Fillon’s austerity plan for France hangs on his own reputation for righteousness. He has argued that his “blood, sweat and tears” drive to cut public spending and reduce the size of the public sector and welfare state, can only work if it is spearheaded by a rigorous, austere figure such as himself, who is “beyond reproach”. It will be much harder to convince a cash-strapped electorate of his controversial plans to slash 500,000 public-sector jobs and make state workers put in more hours for less pay if questions persist about his family’s privileged access to jobs paid for by their taxes.

The prosecutor’s office is also investigating a second job in which the Canard Enchaîné claimed Penelope Fillon was paid €5,000 a month between May 2012 and December 2013 by a literary review owned by a billionaire businessman friend of Fillon. The editor said he had never seen her at the magazine and only knew of two short book reviews she wrote in that time, published under a pseudonym. Fillon said he had seen the work his wife did as an advisor to the review.

Even before “Penelopegate”, cracks had begun to show in Fillon’s presidential campaign in recent weeks. His campaign has been troubled by infighting and rivalries within the rightwing party Les Républicains. Fillon hasn’t been able to clearly spell out his plans for possible social security health system cuts amid internal party criticism and apprehension from voters. His poll ratings had already dipped and he had publicly expressed exasperation with his own spokespeople.



The muddled initial reaction to “Penelopegate” showed the chaos in his campaign – some allies said they had seen his wife at parliament in Paris where they said she did her assistant work, others said she was not in Paris because she did her work in Fillon’s rural constituency in western France.



Fillon had intended to kickstart his flagging campaign this weekend with his first massive rally in Paris. Supporters at his rallies have always lauded the lack of any suspicion around him. The Paris event will now be overshadowed by this.

For decades, French politics has seemed a parallel moral universe where politicians continued mandates and re-election bids blissfully unencumbered at the ballot box by pending legal investigations. With a growing distrust of the political class, that era could be coming to an end.

When Fillon’s huge score in November’s rightwing primary race to choose its presidential candidate knocked out the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, it was largely because Fillon, who was Sarkozy’s prime minister for five years, succeeded in styling himself as the anti-Sarkozy. He had attacked Sarkozy for being the subject of ongoing legal investigations. Fillon’s key selling point was that on a French right historically hit by scandals, he had spent 35 years in politics and stayed completely scandal-free. When Fillon went on TV on Thursday night and presented himself as a victim of calumny and dirty dealings, his defence echoed that of Sarkozy’s denials of any wrongdoing in the past.

The Front National is poised to use “Penelopegate” against Fillon, but it is treading lighter than usual because it is in the awkward position of having its own problems around parliamentary assistants. Le Pen’s party is facing a fraud investigation for the use of more than €300,000 in European parliament funds to employ staff who were accused of carrying out political activity while on that payroll. The party denies wrongdoing.



David Rachline, Le Pen’s campaign director, told France 5 TV he was surprised by the allegations against Fillon, “a candidate who boasted of his integrity”. When asked about the Front National’s own assistant scandal, he shot back that at least those assistants did actually work.

Meanwhile, when a book alleged this week that Macron, the former economy minister, took advantage of finance ministry resources to launch his campaign last year, his office issued a denial and used the occasion to pointedly say he was an outsider to the political class. “Emmanuel Macron has already proved his freedom from a political system to which the other candidates are inextricably linked for the precise reason that they live off it,” his campaign said in a statement.

The electorate has little patience left for a political class it instinctively distrusts. One poll this autumn found 77% of French people thought their MPs were corrupt. In this presidential race, the slightest cloud threatens to cast a long shadow.