French President Emmanuel Macron was under pressure on Monday to declare his previous support for taxi app Uber as economy minister after media revelations were echoed by critics.
Investigations by media outlets including French newspaper Le Monde and Britain’s The Guardian have claimed that Macron held several undeclared meetings with Uber executives when he was minister from 2014 to 2016.
Citing leaked internal documents and text messages, Le Monde also claimed Uber struck a secret “deal” with Macron to regulate the company’s services as it upended the traditional taxi market.
Opposition MPs from the left and far right criticized the president, a former investment banker who positioned himself as a pro-business and innovation politician when he emerged as a national figure in 2014.
Macron is “a lobbyist serving foreign private business interests,” senior far-right MP Sebastien Chenu told Radio France Info on Monday morning.
The 44-year-old president is “an ideologue of deregulation, of globalization,” Chenu added.
Hard-left France Unbowed MP Alexis Corbiere proposed a parliamentary inquiry that could prove embarrassing for the 44-year-old leader, who lost his majority in the National Assembly last month.
“The idea of Mr. Macron deregulating the regulation of the taxi industry with this secret pact is very serious,” he told Senate Public Television. “What lessons should be learned?
“Of course we will put the questions to the government if we can and also a parliamentary inquiry,” he added.
As announced last week, France Unbowed will table a motion of no confidence in the government later on Monday, which is unlikely to pass.
– About ‘partners’? –
The “secret deal” reportedly included Macron promising to help Uber circumvent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate new app-based taxi calling services.
Le Monde described Macron as “more than a supporter, almost a partner” for Uber over the course of 17 meetings he or his employees held with company executives, at a time when the company was facing multiple legal investigations.
Macron rarely responds to public criticism, and on Monday his agenda includes a meeting with heads of multinational investors in France at the annual Choose France summit at the Palace of Versailles near Paris.
Around 180 executives are expected, an increase from previous years that demonstrates “the very strong interest shown by foreign bosses following the president’s re-election,” an adviser said.
Macron beat far-right veteran Marine Le Pen to win a second term in April, promising tax cuts and welfare reforms to boost jobs and big public investments in key industries of the future.
But his party failed to secure a parliamentary majority last month as Le Pen’s far right and hard left made big gains.
On Monday, his office announced a major €5.7 billion ($5.8 billion) investment in a new semiconductor factory in southeastern France by Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics and US-based GlobalFoundries.
– Occupation –
When asked by AFP, Uber France confirmed that the company had been in contact with Macron during his time as minister.
The meetings were as part of his ministerial duties, which covered the private rental sector, it said.
The President’s Office told AFP that at that time Macron was “of course” in contact with “many companies involved in the profound change in services that has taken place in the years mentioned, which was reflected in the lifting of certain administrative or regulatory bans should be facilitated”.
Macron was a vocal and public supporter of Uber when it arrived in France – unlike many of his colleagues in the then Socialist government.
He defended it as employment for people in low-income areas and as a way to break the monopoly of the taxi companies.
“Go to Stains[a slum north of Paris]and tell young people there who volunteer for Uber that it would be better to do nothing or deal drugs,” Macron argued in a 2016 interview with Mediapart.
He also found support on Monday from people who recalled long waits for taxis in Paris and other cities, as well as drivers who refused to accept bank cards as payment.
“Fortunately, there were ministers and elected figures who questioned all of this,” wrote Herve Joly, sociologist with the CNRS research group, on Twitter.
The Uber Files investigation is based on a leak of tens of thousands of documents to Britain’s Guardian newspaper from an anonymous source and was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The ICIJ is working on the story with 42 media partners around the world.
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