Majority of French voters want scandal-hit Fillon to step down: survey

Seven out of ten French voters want conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon to drop out of the election race after allegations over his wife's fake job threw his campaign off course and severely damaged his bid, a survey released on Thursday showed.

Last week, Le Canard Enchaine, a French satirical weekly magazine, reported that the ex-premier had paid his wife and two of his five children about one million euros (1.08 million U.S. dollars) for jobs as parliamentary assistants that they didn't do.

According to the Harris Interactive online poll, 69 percent of French voters said Fillon had to quit the race and be replaced by another contender.

If the former primer minister were to stick to his bid, only 29 percent of voters thought the Republican Party would win the election, while 57 percent said the conservatives would win if represented by another candidate, the survey showed.

It added that former foreign minister Alain Juppe was the preferred candidate to replace Fillon as the presidential candidate for the right-wing party.

Fillon secured a landslide victory in the right-wing primary over Juppe in November 2016 by projecting himself as an honest and morally irreproachable contender. However, the scandal surrounding his wife's suspected fictitious job has tainted his reputation and expected victory.

Since the scandal broke, he lost his top spot and was seen as the third place in the presidential race. The allegations of public fund misuse have rocked his bid with months to go before the election on April 23.

"There's one thing I can say, I will fight (the allegations) to the end, I will be a candidate for this presidential election," Fillon said at an entrepreneurs conference in Paris on Wednesday.

He also asked conservative lawmakers to show "solidarity" and "hold on for 15 days," until financial investigators unveiled the outcome of the preliminary inquiry into the fake job allegations. Endit