France’s president Emmanuel Macron appears to have ditched his centrist allies after two more high-profile government ministers resigned after a month in office.
The ministers who quit were from the MoDem party, which rallied to Macron during his presidential campaign but is now at the centre of a parliamentary jobs investigation.
It brought the number of ministers to leave the Macron administration to four in just 48 hours.
Days after a second-round legislative vote that gave Macron a clear majority in the lower house of parliament – even without the support of the centrist MoDem party – justice minister François Bayrou, the MoDem president, announced he was standing down.
Minutes later, Marielle de Sarnez, minister for European affairs and another MoDem
representative, announced she would also go.
A government spokesman, Christophe Castaner, said their departure “simplified the situation”.
Macron has pledged to clean up politics, while MoDem is caught up in an investigation into the misuse of European funds.
Several of the party’s MEPs are at the centre of an inquiry by Paris anti-corruption police for allegations of “breach of trust and concealment of this offence”, concerning whether assistants employed to work for them at the European parliament were used for MoDem party business.
On Tuesday, defence minister Sylvie Goulard, another high-profile MoDem minister and former MEP, said she was leaving the government to concentrate on fighting the allegations.
MoDem insists it has “respected all the rules and employer regulations” with regard to its parliamentary assistants. Nobody has been charged in the affair.
Goulard’s departure left Bayrou, who was piloting Macron’s so-called morality law through parliament, in an increasingly untenable position.
On Monday, Richard Ferrand, minister for territorial integrity and secretary general of Macron’s La République en March (La REM – Republic on the Move) party, resigned over a separate nepotism scandal.
None of those who have stood down has been formally charged with any offence and all have denied wrongdoing.
The departures came as Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, prepared to announce a mini reshuffle after the legislative results. La REM needed 289 seats for a majority in the 577-seat Assemblée National and won 308. MoDem took 42seats.
Macron has insisted his ministers must be morally irreproachable. He has been nicknamed Jupiter, the all-powerful Roman god of heaven and Earth who embodied a sense of morality, obligation and duty to correct behaviour.
Christophe Barbier, a political analyst, told BFMTV the president was “Macronising” the government to remove possible future sources of tension or opposition.
During Macron’s presidential campaign, Bayrou was the first high-profile politician to rally to the former investment banker, offering him the support of the centrist MoDem party and boosting his chances of victory.
After Macron’s presidential triumph there were clear tensions between the two over the number of government posts given to MoDem. At the time, Bayrou appeared to have won the stand-off, gaining several high-profile jobs, including his own at the justice ministry. On Wednesday, Macron ruthlessly showed who was boss.
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