[YAHOO] French presidential candidate Francois Fillon attempted to fight back on Thursday as pressure mounted on him to quit the race with some politicians from his own side urging him to drop his scandal-tainted bid to save the conservatives from defeat.With opinion polls showing the conservatives that their candidate may be fatally damaged, some senior members of The Republicans urged him to pull out now to give the party time to find a replacement who can save them from defeat.
Fillon, 62, denied wrongdoing after Le Canard Enchaine newspaper reported the former prime minister had paid his wife hundreds of thousands of euros for work she may not have done.
Falling poll ratings since then will benefit far right leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker running as an independent.
A daily IFOP poll of voting intentions for the April 23 first round showed Fillon down one percentage point since Wednesday to be level with Macron. Either candidate would comfortably beat Le Pen in the May 7 runoff, the poll suggests.
"I think our candidate must stop," Alain Houpert, a senator close to Fillon's former rival for the conservative ticket, Nicolas Sarkozy
...23rd President of the French Republic. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit...
, told Public Senat television on Wednesday.
La Belle France 2 television broadcast on Thursday extracts of a 2007 interview of Fillon's Welsh-born wife Penelope telling Britannia's Daily Telegraph that if she had not had her last child she would have looked for work.
She added that beyond helping her husband during campaigns, she had done nothing more.
"I have never been actually his assistant or anything like that. I don't deal with his communication," she said.