The Russian dolls of the scandal engulfing Macron's minister

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Richard Ferrand, appointed to President Emmanuel Macron’s first government as Minister for Territorial Cohesion, has become engulfed in a controversy over the employment of his son as his parliamentary assistant and alleged favouritism in a 2011 property deal handed to his wife by a mutual insurance company when Ferrand was its managing director. The allegations against Ferrand, a socialist MP who last year became secretary general of Macron’s En March! movement, are a major embarrassment for the new government which is about to introduce legislation aimed at cleaning-up political life. But, Mediapart’s political commentator Hubert Huertas argues here, Ferrand’s political opponents would do well to think twice about their calls for his dismissal.

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With the arrangement of financial gains for his wife and the appointement of his son to a job paid from public funds, the revelations this week concerning Richard Ferrand, barely a week into his post as newly-elected president Emmanuel Macron’s minister for “territorial cohesion”, are so obviously similar to the scandal that sunk conservative presidential candidate François Fillon that Ferrand cannot hope to come through the growing controversy in one piece.

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