Emmanuel Macron orchestrated the downfall of his scandal-tainted conservative opponent, François Fillon, in last year’s election, according to Laurent Wauquiez, the new leader of France’s opposition conservative party, Les Républicains, reprots The Telegraph.
“Behind the scenes he [Macron] demolished him,” Mr Wauquiez claimed in remarks to students at a Lyon business school. “I’m sure and certain that it was him who organised it. I think they [Macron’s team] largely contributed to setting up the demolition cell… I have no doubt that the whole thing was remote controlled.”
Mr Fillon, once the frontrunner in the election that brought President Macron to power, was undermined by allegations that he paid his British wife hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money for a job she never did as his his parliamentary assistant.
Mr Wauquiez insisted that his comments on Thursday remain confidential, but they were recorded without his knowledge and broadcast on French TV during the weekend.
He also accused Nicolas Sarkozy, the former conservative president, of having his ministers’ phones tapped. He mocked Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, for lacking charisma and making dull social media postings.
He said he was sure that Mr Macron’s budget minister, Gérald Darmanin, would be forced out of office by rape allegations. However, prosecutors have dropped an investigation into accusations by a former call girl, saying they were unable to establish an “absence of consent”.
In the audio recording, Mr Wauquiez appears to preface his comments by saying: “What I have to say must stay between us. No tweets, no social media posts, no transcription of what I say because otherwise this can’t be a free space and what I’m going to tell you will be just the bullshit that I can say in a media studio.”