Manuel Valls, French Premier, Vows to Repay Cost of Taking Sons to Soccer Match
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said on Thursday that he would pay 2,500 euros to the state after he provoked an uproar by taking a government Falcon jet to watch the Champions League soccer final in Berlin with his two young sons over the weekend. Mr. Valls, a charismatic Socialist who has sought to fashion himself as a man of the people, was criticized by the opposition and on social media for a trip estimated by the French daily Le Monde to have cost as much as €15,000, or about $16,800. At a time when France’s economy is in the doldrums, with unemployment above 10 percent and growth lackluster, opposition members and other critics jumped on the trip as evidence that the governing Socialist Party was oblivious to the struggle endured by everyday French. The outcry also threatened to further dent the party’s image and that of François Hollande, the unpopular president who has sought to cast his left-leaning party as an alternative to the “bling bling” excess of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, a likely challenger in the 2017 presidential elections. “The reality is that the Paris-Berlin family flight took off. But employment still hasn’t!” Rachida Dati, a former justice minister under Mr. Sarkozy, wrote on Twitter. Mathieu Baudier, a Berlin-based French entrepreneur, mused about Mr. Valls’s extravagance, comparing him unfavorably to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. She is one of the most powerful people on earth, he noted on Twitter, but “regularly goes shopping on her own in Berlin.” Mr. Valls had initially fended off accusations that the trip was inappropriate, saying that sports played an important role for France and that he had left a Socialist congress in Poitiers, France, so he could conduct government business in Berlin. Mr. Hollande also leapt to his defense, saying that Mr. Valls had traveled to Berlin to meet Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, to discuss the corruption scandal ensnaring FIFA, which oversees global soccer, and to discuss the 2016 European soccer championships, which France is to host. Mr. Platini, who visited Paris days later, confirmed that he had invited Mr. Valls to the final. Responding on Thursday to the mounting criticism, Mr. Valls told reporters on a trip to the French overseas department of Réunion that taking his sons with him had not added to the cost of the Berlin trip. But he said he had taken note of the public criticism, regretted bringing his children along, and was eager to put a “pointless controversy” behind him. “I must comport myself with the utmost rigor,,” he said, according to the French news media. “If the situation presented itself again, I would not repeat it.” “To lift any further doubts, I have decided to reimburse the cost for my two children, which comes out to €2,500,” he said. Mr. Valls’s aides told the French daily Le Figaro that he arrived at the figure of €2,500 by calculating the average cost of a commercial trip for the three flights taken by his children: from Paris to Poitiers, Poitiers to Berlin and Berlin to Poitiers. Mr. Valls was born in Barcelona in 1962 and is an avid fan who supports the Spanish club, which defeated Italy’s Juventus 3-1 in the match on Saturday in Berlin. Mr. Valls, a former interior minister of France, has taken a tough stance against illegal migration and been mentioned as a future presidential contender. |