Pressad Fillon presenterar ekonomisk plan

François Charles Amand Fillon (French pronunciation: ​[fʁɑ̃.swa ʃaʁl amɑ̃ fi.jɔ̃]; born 4 March 1954) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 2007 to 2012 under President Nicolas Sarkozy. He is the current nominee of the Republicans (previously known as the Union for a Popular Movement), the country's largest centre-right political party, for the 2017 presidential election. Fillon became Jean-Pierre Raffarin's Minister of Labour in 2002 and undertook controversial reforms of the 35-hour working week law and of the French retirement system. In 2004, as Minister of National Education he proposed the much debated Fillon law on Education. In 2005, Fillon was elected Senator for the Sarthe Département. His role as a political advisor in Nicolas Sarkozy's successful race for President led to his becoming Prime Minister in 2007. Fillon resigned upon Sarkozy's defeat by François Hollande in the 2012 presidential elections. Running on a platform described as conservative, Fillon entered the 2016 Republican presidential primary. He seemed a likely third as late as a week before the first round of voting, held on 20 November. He finally placed first in the first round, defeating Alain Juppé in the primary run-off a week later. Following his victory in the primary, opinion polls show Fillon as one of the frontrunners for the 2017 presidential election along with Marine Le Pen (FN) and Emmanuel Macron (EM). François Fillon was one of the first candidate of the most important French party to "be formally charged in a widening embezzlement investigation" due to "formal charges looming that he had paid his wife and children hundreds of thousands of euros from the public payroll for little or no work" during the presidential race. Nevertheless, he decided not to resign.