The French government has unveiled its new “moralisation law” pledged by Emmanuel Macron to clean up French politics following a series of fraud scandals, reports The Guardian.
The justice minister, François Bayrou, said the legislation aimed to bury the idea there was one law for “ordinary citizens” and another for politicians.
“For years we have seen practices develop that have damaged people’s confidence in their elected representatives and provoked a profound exasperation among the French,” Bayrou told a press conference.
Bayrou said the bill was not intended to “solve personal problems of morality” but eliminate conflicts of interest. “Morality is a personal question. Institutions are not set up to make men virtuous but knowing that not all are, they are set up to avoid human weaknesses contaminating the public body.”
Members of parliament, local representatives and senior civil servants will be banned from employing members of their family and required to make a declaration of personal interest. Instead of being given a sum of money for expenses without having to justify expenditure, they would need to produce receipts to be reimbursed for what they had spent.
Any person convicted of a crime or offence concerning their honesty would be banned from public office for 10 years.
Macron put financial and ethical probity in public life at the heart of his presidential campaign after scandals hit his rivals, the conservative candidate François Fillon and the far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen.
The new president was under growing pressure on Thursday to ditch a newly appointed minister and key adviser after French prosecutors announced they were launching a preliminary investigation into allegations of favouritism.
Richard Ferrand, the minister of territorial cohesion and secretary general of Macron’s La République en Marche (Republic on the Move) party, has dismissed calls to resign, insisting he has done nothing wrong.
The affair is an embarrassment to Macron, and comes just one week before the first round of vital parliamentary elections.
Thursday’s announcement of the inquiry came a week after the prosecutor’s office in Brest, Brittany, declared there was no evidence Ferrand had broken any law and ruled out an investigation.