‘McKinseygate’ won’t bring down Macron

We are in the final stretch before the first round of voting in the French presidential election on 10 April and Macron is still cruising to victory — though perhaps not quite as serenely as he had hoped.

‘McKinseygate’ is the latest scandal that probably won’t change much. Six million fonctionnaires being apparently insufficient to govern France, it transpires that Macron’s government has paid €2.4 billion (£2 billion) to consultants including McKinsey mainly to tell it what to do about Covid. Doubtless a mere bagatelle when the bill is finally totalled for the plague, but embarrassing.

As anyone familiar with McKinsey could have predicted, the laptop geniuses turned France into an absurdist dystopia — a society in which it was necessary to fill out a form to take the dog for a walk, legal to buy liquor, a crime to buy clothes for children.

Le Monde reports numerous links between the president and McKinsey, whose executives and alumni played a role in the campaign of candidate Macron in 2017, including Karim Tadjeddine (current head of the ‘public sector’ branch of the firm), Eric Hazan (a leader of the digital branch) and Guillaume de Ranieri (head of aerospace and defence). Inquiring journalists are told to take up the matter with ministers.

So that’s McKinseygate — also known as Macronskygate. With Macron, however, one scandal merely conceals another. Macron’s recent obligatory declaration of patrimony is another. He risibly claims to have a net worth of €500,000 (£420,000), less than his rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who unlike Macron, never worked at Rothschild. A contemporary estimates Macron was paid several million at Rothschild, where he stopped off on his short march to the presidency. Where all of these emoluments are now is completely invisible. Did he spend the money? Or has he hidden it?

There’s talk of offshoring – banks are good at this.