Emmanuel Macron reacts to the twist in the McKinsey affair

Agence France-Presse compares the case to the ” sticking plaster by Captain Haddock. The French president had to react, this Friday, to the press release published the day before by the national financial prosecutor’s office, about judicial information launched at the end of October on the 2017 and 2022 electoral campaigns.

” I fear nothing “, and ” I believe that the heart of the investigation is not yours truly “Launched a very smiling Emmanuel Macron, in front of the journalists who accompanied him on the trip to Dijon, faced with the return of the affair of the American consulting firm McKinsey to the front of the stage.

►To re-read: France: several surveys on the role of consulting firms in the 2017 and 2022 elections

“ Like you, I learned from the press that there were associations and elected officials who had decided to take legal action, it is normal for justice to do its job, it does it freely, it will precisely shed light on this subject “, he added, after the statements of the financial prosecutor.

My 2017 campaign accounts, they have already been submitted to all the procedures, to the judge, they have been validated by the procedures that our laws provide (and) those of 2022 are on the way like all the candidates (…) that all the light is shed and the transparency is made.

” It has always been like this “

Regarding the voluntary participation of employees of the private firms in question, the Head of State assumes. Did they subsequently benefit from favoritism in the awarding of public contracts? ” So I tell you no “, he replies, adding “ be already explained hundreds of times “.

In a presidential campaign, there are women and men; there are those who are journalists, there are those who are magistrates, there are those who work in consulting firms, there are those who are civil servants, who get involved and who give time in their free time, It has always been like this.

Justice takes its course. ” Nobody wrote to me, nobody called me “, specifies Mr. Macron. ” I, in this case, can tell you what a President of the Republic does and what President of the Republic does not do: he is not going to have fun awarding this or that contract “, he defends himself.

Two judicial inquiries were opened on October 20 and 21, we learned from the national financial prosecutor’s office on Thursday. The first relates in particular to the heads of ” non-compliant keeping of campaign accounts and reduction of accounting elements in a campaign account “.

The second relates to suspicions of ” favoritism ” and ” concealment of favoritism » concerning them; it is the result of several complaints filed by associations and elected officials, said the financial public prosecutor in his press release, without citing Mr. Macron explicitly.

“A number of questions”

The name McKinsey is therefore bursting into the news again. The famous consulting firm had parasitized the race for the re-election of Emmanuel Macron last spring. The deputy Les Républicains Véronique Louwagie chaired a fact-finding mission on these consulting firms last year.

She is delighted that today the national financial prosecutor’s office is interested in it.

On these questions, ultimately, we have very little transparency, and it is true that the use of these external service providers, these consulting firms, rightly raises questions. This is the reason, moreover, for which there had been a fact-finding mission to the National Assembly. We know that there is more and more recourse to consulting firms by the State, and that behind it, there is not a lot of information, and the fact of not being able to evaluate them quantitatively, the fact not being able to assess them qualitatively either raises a number of questions. And I believe that a lot of transparency is needed on this subject, and there, in this case, the data is incomplete on the subject.

“A vagueness that weakens democracy”

The French head of state is protected by his criminal immunity, provided for in article 67 of the Constitution. The issues raised, according to Communist MP Sébastien Jumel, nevertheless pose a problem, both legally and politically.

There was a time when we spoke of lobbies, that is to say the external pressure exerted by this type of consulting firms on the power to manufacture the law or to respond to their interests. Today, these pressures are no longer on the outside, they are on the inside, so much the connivance, the consanguinity, the constant comings and goings between the major decision-makers and these cabinets reveal a vagueness which weakens democracy. So, yes, it is a legal question. It is up to the national financial prosecutor’s office to explore it to the end, and I hope that it will have the means to do so, and then it is a political question because it weakens democracy and in a way risks to aggravate the gap between our citizens and the politicians.