Earlier this week, on Tuesday 8 July, the interim leaders of France's main opposition party the right-wing UMP released details of the latest audit on its finances. It did not make for pretty reading. True, the party's debts had come down from the colossal 96 million euros it had suffered back in 2012, the year of President Nicolas Sarkozy's election defeat to François Hollande and the party's hammering at parliamentary elections. But at just under 80 million euros the current debt is still unsustainable for a party whose income was around 46 million euros in 2013.
The independent audit said that the party, still reeling from the Bygmalion funding scandal surrounding claims that it hid the true cost of Sarkozy's 2012 election campaign, and from the ongoing affairs that surround Sarkozy himself, must reduce its running costs and renegotiate its credit deals with banks. In the meantime the funding crisis raises real doubts about how the UMP will be able to pay for primary elections to choose its next presidential candidate for 2017 and how it will be able to pay for the presidential campaign itself. It even poses questions over the staging of its scheduled autumn conference to find a new leader after its former head Jean-François Copé stepped down in May over the 2012 election funding scandal. Because of the expense, it is likely that the November 'conference' will not take place physically but will instead give members the chance to vote electronically.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Indeed, the funding crisis revealed this week inevitably raises the issue of whether the UMP can and will survive at all. The mayor of the southern city of Nice, Christian Estrosi, did not mince his words when interviewed by Le Parisien newspaper about the state of the party. “The UMP is terribly weakened,” he said. “I'd go even further – in its current conception the party is already dead.”
The right-wing party's problems are far from just financial. Both before and after the audit was made public the French media was awash with allegations, claims and counter-claims about senior party figures or their families or partners benefiting personally from the stricken party's funds, allegations that do not feature in the audit itself. These incessant media leaks were widely seen as “score settling”, whether between rival ideological factions in the party or as a result of the often bitter personal rivalry and mistrust that exists between some party figures.
For example, the Journal du Dimanche (JDD) newspaper revealed last Sunday that in 2013 alone the UMP paid out 24,000 euros for flights for Jean-François Copé's wife Nadia Copé. Jean-François Cope's entourage does not dispute the figures but says that the former UMP leader's wife had a “representative” role in the party. One source close to Copé told Le Parisien: “[Nadia Copé] was travelling on official visits, following the practice put in place by [Jean-François Copé's] predecessors. He has never hidden his wife's presence during his trips.”
The JDD also revealed that Geoffroy Didier, a lawyer and regional councillor who was deputy secretary general of the UMP until June 2014, was paid a monthly salary of 8,500 euros (6,200 euros net) by the party for his work in “collaboration” with the then vice-president of the UMP Brice Hortefeux. One former UMP minister, quoted anonymously, said this salary was an “unjustifiable abuse”. Didier himself did not deny the salary but his entourage said there was nothing wrong in such a payment. “He accepts he was paid this salary and has nothing to apologise for,” says a source close to Didier, who is a founder member of the right-wing grouping in the UMP known as the Droite Forte.
Yet another revelation last weekend was the claim that former health minister Xavier Bertrand, who was secretary general of the UMP from 2009 to 2010, used 649.60 euros of UMP funds to pay for a family holiday at a Center Parcs site. Bertrand quickly denied the claim, brandishing a receipt from December 2009 showing his name on the Center Parcs document. “I pay my own bills,” he told radio station France Info.
Later in the week the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné revealed that the former justice minister and current UMP Euro MP Rachida Dati's 10,000-euro per year phone bill was paid by the party, also citing 13,000 euros in train and aeroplane tickets, and alleged that the party spent 7,000 euros a month to pay for one of Dati's assistants. Dati did not deny the phone bill but pointed out it was paid for in relation to her party functions, as were the travel expenses. But she did deny that the UMP paid for one of her staff. She added: “The UMP has never paid for my personal expenses!”
Dati said the leak was a deliberate attempt to undermine her and came from the camp of former prime minister François Fillon, with whom she is on notoriously bad terms. Fillon, who served as premier from 2007 to 2012 under President Sarkozy, is one of three former prime ministers – the others are Alain Juppé and Jean-Pierre Raffarin – put in temporary charge of the UMP ahead of its November conference. Dati demanded that all of them show “transparency” over the funding of their own political clubs and think tanks.
The former minister of justice also launched a more personal attack on Fillon. Having denounced whoever leaked her phone bill details to the press as “hooligans and informers” who sought to “sully and destroy” people's reputations, Dati added: “It's not my fault or anyone else's if François Fillon put up with being humiliated by Nicolas Sarkozy for five years!”
The allegation that rival camps were using the leaks to “settle scores” was echoed by others. A source close to Geoffroy Didier noted that the only two party salaries that featured in the leaks were those of Didier and Éric Cesari, the former director general of the UMP who earned 12,500 euros a month (10,000 euros net), who are both well-known supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy. “We mustn’t be fooled by this orchestrated campaign which suits some people very well,” said the source.
Meanwhile Jean-François Copé's entourage insisted that the leaks were designed to damage certain sections of the party. “If the audit doesn't mention [these details] that means that this information has been knowing leaked,” said a source close to the former UMP leader. “There is a quite worrying willingness to cause harm” added the source, pointing the finger quite clearly at François Fillon's entourage.
'At the UMP people now pay for their own Nespresso capsules!'
However, the former prime minister was himself on the receiving end of leaks on Thursday when Europe 1 radio revealed documented details of flights made by François Fillon, in 2006 and 2007, which were paid for by the UMP. One trip alone, a flight in a private Falcon 10 jet from Biarritz to Madrid in 2006 for a political conference then a return flight to Paris, cost the party 14,200 euros. A helicopter flight in May 2007, just after Fillon became prime minister, from Paris to his constituency in west France and back, cost the UMP 6,593 euros.
In his defence, Fillon's entourage said the trip to Spain was to attend a conference of Spain's right-wing People's Party and that “he didn't really have a choice about his mode of transport...at the time François Fillon was neither president nor treasurer of the UMP”. As for the constituency trip in 2007 during the parliamentary elections campaign a source said: “It's quite understandable that in an election campaign it's the UMP and not the prime minister’s office that pays. Doing it the other way round would have been unacceptable and open to criticism.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The details about Fillon's flights were widely seen as coming from Jean-François Copé's camp in retaliation for the leaks that occurred earlier in the week. But ironically they came just a day after Copé had used his Facebook page to criticise the personal attacks and rivalries that were damaging the UMP and hampering its role as a party of opposition. “The settling of personal score is making the UMP inaudible,” he wrote, accusing “certain members of the UMP” of being motivated by a “desire of revenge and personal resentment”. Explaining why he had not previously spoken out publicly since quitting the party leadership he noted: “Some people are astonished by my silence and want me to fight back. But when everyone is trying to drag you down it is better to take the high ground.” An investigation has now been launched inside the party to find the source of the leaks.
Meanwhile Copé, the MP for Meaux, north-east of Paris, himself had more questions to answer on Wednesday when Mediapart revealed that his wife Nadia has been employed as his parliamentary assistant at the National Assembly for six years. This is not against parliamentary rules. However, Copé has never publicly declared that his wife worked for him. Indeed, in an interview with Paris Match in February 2013 he said: “Some people keep their professional and private lives separate, and that is the case with me.” He said of his wife, whom he married in 2011: “I'm very happy that she follows my progress. She's become an activist. She supports me. She is passionate about it.” Contacted by Mediapart, Copé's entourage said: “Nadia Copé has a role in giving advice, she is even his leading advisor.” The source added that sometimes she holds his constituency surgery in Meaux when he is away.
Despite the seemingly endless cascade of revelations about the party, including the dismal state of its finances, the UMP insists it has made progress in cleaning up its act and cutting costs. The team running the party under Copé note that the number of paid staff at the party has gone from 130 in 2012 to fewer than 95 today. “At the UMP people now pay for their own Nespresso capsules!” a source says. And when it comes to travel, he adds: “We have reduced costs. Copé travelled with fewer staff than before and went second class.”
But the problem is not simply one of money but also the personal enmities, bitter rivalries and lack of ideological clarity that have prevented the party from defining its values and policies. Many frustrated younger party members and elected representatives believe time has been wasted since the election defeats of 2012, ahead of the next presidential and parliamentary elections in 2017. Maël de Calan, UMP national secretary and co-founder of the party's policy think tank the Boîte à idées, says: “The UMP is repeating what the Socialist party did from 2002 to 2012, providing systematic criticism of the government without fully worked out assessments. We haven't understood that being in opposition is the time when you prepare not for winning power, but for power itself.” He adds: “The problem is less 2017, and more about what to do in terms of policies between 2017 and 2022. If you don't prepare to govern it's catastrophic.”
However, for the UMP the question of who runs the country may not be the only issue in the 2017 elections. The party's very survival could be at stake too. For if the UMP fails to win the presidential or parliamentary elections in that year its share of the state aid given to mainstream parties will fall, and some observers believe that as a result its headquarters in Paris may have to be sold to pay off its debts.
And given the current mood of self-destruction in the party – the situation is described as “open warfare” by some observers - victory at the ballot box in three years looks anything but assured. Even the temporary leadership of the party by the three former prime ministers Juppé, Raffarin and Fillon has failed to calm the feverish mood in the party. Earlier this week the party's secretary general Luc Chatel, a former education minister, sounded at the end of his tether as he launched an inquiry to find the source of the leaks. “I can't take any more,” he told Europe 1. “I've had enough of certain people, I don't know whether it comes from inside or outside, who want to destabilise the UMP.” He added: “I notice at each policy committee meeting, and I'm going to say it to those in charge now, the triumvirate who were supposed to bring us calmness and peace, that you can clearly see that we are in complete discord.”
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English version by Michael Streeter