INVESTIGATION
It was a case that marked a presidential election, but also the entire political class. After being postponed on Monday due to the lawyers' strike, the Fillon trial begins on Wednesday. The former right-wing presidential candidate of 2017 is suspected of fictitious jobs for having paid his wife Pénélope as a collaborator in the Assembly. But since this scandal, the hemicycle has taken steps to prevent the situation from happening again.
Prohibition on hiring a spouse or their children
This security takes the form of a law, effective since the summer of 2017, which stipulates that a deputy or a senator can no longer hire his spouse or his children, under penalty of three years in prison and 45,000 euros. fine. Since its promulgation, at least 42 collaborators were dismissed from the Assembly and the Senate, all the others had to resign of themselves. Only here, this new policy caused the dissatisfaction of certain parliamentarians.
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Because the Fillon affair caused an amalgam between family jobs and fictitious jobs. In the National Assembly, several voices denounce an injustice: in companies, you can hire your children without that causing problems, while it is now prohibited in politics. "My collaborating spouse went to the services, worked on the files, was present at all the meetings of the Assembly", gathers on the microphone of Europe 1 the deputy ecologist ex-LREM François Michel Lambert, who had to dismiss her since. "She was known to everyone, maybe sometimes better known than I. It is terrible because there is a deception: the problems persist and a few people have been sacrificed."
The parade to the new law
Enacted to make the Assembly more transparent, this law appears to have had the opposite effect to some extent. "We have entered a much more nebulous system: because there are always 'sons of'. They no longer work for their father or their mother, but for another deputy", explains Astride Morne, collaborator and union official UNSA USCP. "It is a small trick, but at the same time, family employment can be of good quality. It can be people who work very well, who have studied for, and have a certain skill." However, this practice remains marginal, and must be declared.
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However, the "Penelope Gate" has had a positive effect: highlighting the reality of the work of parliamentary assistant, in which the longer days and night work are legion. This has made it possible to clean up certain practices. If previously a deputy could ask for "things that have nothing to do with the tasks usually devolved to a parliamentary attaché, such as babysitting a child, picking up laundry, or even sending back a parcel", that is now less common. A job sheet has even been put in place to define the tasks of employees.
The only downside to this initiative is that it is optional. This allows Tavana Livardjani, collaborator of the SNP FO union, to recall that "important subjects in this whole story are what a deputy can ask his collaborator".