PARIS — He left the corruption scandal-plagued Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front speechless. He made the nepotism-tarred center-right candidate, François Fillon, grin frigidly, murmuring about a lawsuit. And from the immaculately groomed television anchors he drew only condescending fixed smiles.
It took barely over a minute for Philippe Poutou, a balding and unkempt Ford factory mechanic from Bordeaux running as a fringe candidate in France’s presidential election, to puncture the mutually protective world of the race’s mainstream. Afterward television commentators tut-tutted about his “lack of respect.” That was exactly Mr. Poutou’s point.
So effective was his brutal anti-corruption language that two days after a marathon four-hour debate among all 11 French presidential candidates, the rumpled no-hope candidate of the New Anticapitalist Party was being hailed in some news media here as its unquestioned winner. Mr. Poutou, 50, had instantly become a kind of folk hero, one expressing in unvarnished form what many Frenchmen and women are thinking: The political class, encased in its privileges, is demonstrably corrupt.
The corruption scandals, widely aired in the print press, have been mostly taboo beneath a well-maintained facade of respectability in these debates.
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But Mr. Poutou did not plan to ignore them. Instead of a suit, he wore a white henley T-shirt and had barely shaved. He refused to pose for the group photo at the beginning.
“It’s not because I’m not wearing a tie that you can cut me off,” he said sharply to one of the debate hosts, who was trying to curb him. Running from a far-left party that got 1 percent of the vote in the last election, Mr. Poutou had little to lose.
There was going to be trouble.
It came like a Scud missile, as Le Monde put it.
Mr. Poutou turned to Ms. Le Pen, whose surging National Front appears on the verge of a historic breakthrough, all but guaranteed a place in May’s presidential runoff against the other probable finalist, the former economy minister Emmanuel Macron.
At the same time, her party is mired in twin corruption scandals, one involving fake jobs at the European Parliament, the other fake campaign-expense billing reimbursed by the state. Close associates have been charged.
Ms. Le Pen, a supposed “outsider” candidate from a populist party, has refused to answer a police summons, invoking “parliamentary immunity.”
That angered Mr. Poutou. He didn’t bother with honorifics or first names — another sore point for the offended television commentators.
“And then we’ve got Le Pen, next to me, Le Pen, dipping into the public purse,” Mr. Poutou said. “It’s not here, it’s Europe, and now for somebody who is anti-European, the worst is that the National Front, which calls itself anti-system, it doesn’t give a damn. It protects itself thanks to the laws of the system, thanks to parliamentary immunity, and so refuses to answer a police summons.”
Then he scored what was acknowledged as the evening’s bull’s-eye, aimed squarely at Ms. Le Pen: “When we workers are summoned by the police, we don’t have worker’s immunity. Sorry about that. There it is. Here we go,” Mr. Poutou said.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/worl ... p=cur&_r=0
