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Who is François Fillon – the man who ended Sarkozy's dream? Who is François Fillon – the man who ended Sarkozy's dream?
(about 3 hours later)
François Fillon, who beat his former boss Nicolas Sarkozy to join Alain Juppé in the second round of voting for France’s rightwing Republican party’s presidential candidate, is a social conservative who likes drinking tea, driving classic cars and cutting state spending.
The 62-year-old Paris MP’s campaign slogan to slash half a million public sector jobs over five years is inspired by his heroine, Margaret Thatcher. For many of his 35 years in politics, François Fillon has hovered around the highest corridors of French power, often overshadowed by a brighter, more determined star, and never quite considered capable of clinching the ultimate job as president.
Of the seven Republican candidates, Fillon was the most outspoken advocate of what is seen in France as the Anglo-Saxon economic model. He appears unafraid of offending the French statist tradition or fuelling a popular backlash against neoliberal economics. In his last rally before Sunday’s vote, he said: “I’m tagged with an [economically] liberal label in the same way one would paint crosses on the doors of lepers in the middle ages. But I’m just a pragmatist.” Hard-working, socially conservative and loyal, he seemed a man destined to stay in a secondary role. An Anglophile tea-drinker who likes racing cars, he has a suspicious affinity for the Anglo-Saxon free-market economic model. He even admitted to admiring Margaret Thatcher - never a quick ticket to electoral success in France.
Fillon served as prime minister under Sarkozy, and is remembered for defying street protests and championing a rise in the retirement age. Eclipsed most notably by Nicolas Sarkozy, who appointed him prime minister in 2007 and then spent the next five years treating him as an underling, he entered Les Républicains primary race as the third man to frontrunners Alain Juppé and Sarkozy. That is where the polls suggested he would stay.
He tried to distance himself from Sarkozy after the 2008 financial crash by describing the country as bankrupt and suggesting France needed to cut state spending further. Opponents have questioned why he carried on serving as Sarkozy’s prime minister if he disagreed with his approach. Just a week ago, it seemed Fillon’s campaign would crash and burn when faced with the relentless ambition of his former boss. But on Sunday night, the 62-year-old emerged, thrust suddenly into the spotlight, to grab a celebratory demi of beer with which to toast his first place and an extraordinary 44% of the vote.
Sarkozy was disdainful of Fillon as a presidential candidate, referring to him as one of his staff. But Fillon had the last laugh. By pipping him to the second round runoff next week, Fillon has all but ended Sarkozy’s political career. It was one of the most surprising political reversals in France since the Front National founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, scraped into the second round of the presidential elections in 2002.
The advocate for fiscal austerity lives in a 12th-century chateau in western France and likes driving classic sports cars at the nearby Le Mans race track. He has even appeared on the French equivalent of Top Gear. Even at his most confident, Fillon couldn’t have imagined doing so well in the first-round primary, leaving Juppé trailing with 28%. The rival camps were equally astounded. Having consigned Fillon to the role of “also-ran” they had not wasted much energy attacking him or his policies.
He and his Welsh wife, Penelope Clarke, have five children and keep horses. The couple, who met while she was teaching English in Le Mans and he was working at the French ministry of defence, married at a country church near Abergavenny. She is the first British woman to be married to a French prime minister. Her sister, Jane, is married to Fillon’s brother, Pierre. Politically, Fillon has been described as a Gallic Thatcher, conservative with both a capital and small “c”. He has spoken out against France’s statist tradition, he is an outspoken fan of neoliberal economic policies and big on “authority”.
Fillon is the the epitome of the traditional provincial right. He voted against same-sex marriage when it was introduced by the Socialist president François Hollande, and had the support of the traditional Catholic right. Claiming to stand for Christian family values, he has campaigned against medically assisted procreation for single women or lesbian couples. In a letter to church leaders last month, he promised to uphold the principle that “a child is always the fruit of a father and mother”. “I’m tagged with the liberal label in the same way they would paint crosses on lepers’ doors in the middle ages, but I’m just a pragmatist,” he said recently. He opposed same sex marriage and adoption laws, but has said he will not repeal them. He has described French colonialism as a form of cultural exchange.
He surged in the polls in the final weeks of the campaign after publishing a book on the fight against radical Islam, saying “there isn’t a religious problem in France. Yes, there is a problem linked to Islam.” He said the solution was not to target law-abiding Muslims, but to target fundamentalism. He will set alarm bells ringing in Westminster with his calls for a rapprochement with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Syria. Asked early in the campaign whether France should cooperate with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State, he said France should unite with all possible forces, “democratic or not”.
But he caused anger among a black rights association during the campaign when he referred to French colonialism as France “sharing our culture”. The son of a provincial solicitor and an English teacher from Sarthe in west France, Fillon had a strict, Catholic upbringing and reportedly wanted to be a journalist travelling the world. Instead, he studied law and became a parliamentary assistant to his local MP. He was elected to the national assembly in 1981 aged just 27.
Fillon has called for a rapprochement with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Syria. After the US election, he welcomed a new alliance between Putin and Donald Trump. Asked early in the campaign whether France should cooperate with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State, he said France should unite with all possible forces, “democratic or not”. He told the website Atlantico in October: “De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt allied with Stalin to defeat nazism.” The year before, he had wed, far from his terroir, in the 17th-century church of St Bartholomew in the village of Llanover, near Abergavenny. His wife, now potentially France’s future first lady - a title that does not officially exist - is Welsh-born Penelope Kathryn Clarke.
Fillon said the French people “wanted authority” and his was a “powerful project” to reform France. The couple met when Penny, as she is known to friends, spent her final year of a French and German degree as a teaching assistant at a school in Le Mans. She returned to study law at Bristol University and when she qualified the pair got married.
The Fillons have five children and live in a 12th century chateau near where he grew up in Sarthe. A lesser known fact is that Penny’s younger sister Jane is married to Fillon’s younger brother Philippe.
“My father was very pleased I married a Frenchman, then when my sister did the same he banned our other two sisters from French men,” she said in a 2007 interview the day after her husband was named prime minister.
The couple are fiercely protective of their family’s privacy, and Penny Fillon admits she prefers country life with her horses and children to partying and politicking in Paris. Ultra-discreet, she is described as “the anti-Carla Bruni” as the antithesis of Sarkozy’s supermodel-turned-singer wife.
In the same 2007 interview, she said: “People ask what my new role is, but there isn’t one. Once this week is over everything will die down and I will be able to carry on as before … I don’t get recognised in the street and I hope not to. That would horrify me.
“In fact because my husband gets recognised I often walk on the other side of the road, which I suppose isn’t very nice of me.”
In a recent interview, Fillon’s eldest daughter Marie described how her father loved messing about at home repairing electrical and computer equipment. She recounted how her youngest brother’s nursery school teacher once asked what his father - then prime minister - did for a living. The boy replied: “He repairs computers.”
He also likes racing cars at Le Mans, and once appeared on the French equivalent of Top Gear to bemoan, among other things, the dismal state of French car design.
Penny Fillon has said her husband is determined but “unlike most politicians, does not have the killer instinct. He has kept a sort of decency about him, which is a good thing as a human being but perhaps not so good ambition-wise”.
If he has not developed a killer instinct since, he will have to do so fast. Having massacred Sarkozy’s presidential ambitions, he must now finish off Juppé’s career to finally escape from the shadows.