Emmanuel Macron's supporters thought that the story would not come out of the social network jar. Too "complicated". Then, on Tuesday, March 29, the president of the Assemblée Nationale (the lower house of France's parliament), Richard Ferrand, had the unpleasant surprise of being questioned by a man in a public meeting in Paris about the McKinsey affair, named after the consulting firm that has become the symbol of the state's growing use of private companies for advice over the last five years. The government spent more than a billion euros on external consultancy in 2021, according to a Senate report published on March 17, which mentions a "far-reaching phenomenon" and an amount that has "more than doubled" in three years. Security immediately made the man leave the room – "Isn't democracy great!" we hear him shout in a video that has gone viral on Twitter – before he was finally allowed to come back in and sit down in the audience.
Is this just anecdotal? Nothing is anymore. Ten days before the first round of the presidential elections on April 10, no controversy can be "neglected", those close to Emmanuel Macron admit. His campaign is showing signs of weakness. Especially since the opposition are calling it a "state scandal". Certain McKinsey consultants worked pro bono for Mr. Macron's campaign in 2017.
The company is also accused of tax evasion, which makes for an explosive cocktail of allegations. The right-wing candidate of the party "Les Républicains", Valérie Pécresse, was quick to demand "total clarity" on "Emmanuel Macron's links with the consultant McKinsey." "What is the public financial prosecutor's office waiting for, given they were so quick over François Fillon's suits?" asked the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, referring to a scandal involving the former presidential candidate François Fillon, who had accepted 50,000 euros worth of suits as a gift. Zemmour also raised the specter of a "quid pro quo" situation between the president and the company.
Emmanuel Macron has said several times in recent days that "There are rules of public procurement", denying any "scheme". "If there is evidence of manipulation, it should be settled in court!" he said angrily on Sunday, March 27, on French public channel France 3. But the story is not over yet.
"There is nothing substantially, but the more you wait, the more it snowballs," said a source close to Mr. Macron. "We must untangle the various threads of this story as soon as possible; some of it is true, but a lot of it is pure fantasy." There is a big risk that this will fuel the campaign of the far-right Rassemblement National candidate, Marine Le Pen, who is enjoying momentum in the polls and, according to Macron supporters, feeds on "conspiracy theories." The president's supporters also know, since the Benalla affair – a scandal in which the president's bodyguard was caught on film assaulting demonstrators during a protest – that a seemingly harmless case can have a slowly poisonous effect.
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