French president Francois Hollande (l) in discussion with budget minister Jerome Cahuzac. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/REUTERS
It is hard to think of a worse scandal for the Socialist government in France. As "President Normal" and "Mr Fair", François Hollande's whole being and essence was to crack down on tax evasion and financial corruption, making the wealthy pay their share in dragging France out of its economic woes. Riding his scooter, living in his modest flat and taking a salary cut, Hollande had promised that, unlike Nicolas Sarkozy before him, his presidency would be "exemplary", squeaky clean, and totally just.
But now Jerome Cahuzac, the trusted tax tsar and budget minister who had vigorously led Hollande's crusade against fraudsters and tax-dodging millionaires, has made a shock confession of his own monumental fraud. With investigators and journalists closing in on the truth, he admitted hiding €600,000 (£509,000) from the taxman in a secret foreign account for 20 years. Not only that; Cahuzac had spent the past four months repeatedly lying on TV and to parliament, where he insisted from the government benches: "I do not have, I have never had, an account abroad, not now, not ever."
French media all used the same word to describe the scandal's impact on Hollande's presidency: "devastating".
There is no criminal offence of perjury for lying to parliament in France. But Cahuzac, if he goes to court, faces up to five years in prison for laundering the proceeds of tax fraud. The former cardiologist, who then became a hair-transplant plastic surgeon before turning to politics, tried what the French papers called "a very American approach" of confessing and begging for forgiveness, but as journalists in Paris said, that is not the French way.
Le Monde warned in a scathing front-page editorial that the Cahuzac saga had struck at the heart of power in France and the credibility of the Élysée.
The reason the Cahuzac scandal has so shaken the French government is that it is all about money, taxation and solidarity – the life-blood of Hollande's project. After almost a year in power, the president faces record unpopularity as he struggles with spiralling unemployment, factory closures and a stagnant economy. He now faces an even harder task of selling his economic policies to a doubting and cash-strapped nation when his taxman in chief, the man responsible for fiscal "justice", was hiding a stack of cash from the tax authorities and brazenly lying about it.
The Cahuzac scandal's image of two-faced champagne socialism blows apart the values of civic duty and solidarity which the French left was hoping to rely on in hard times. France was already deeply mistrustful of its political class.
It is some relief to Hollande that although the government had resolutely stood by Cahuzac during four months of investigations by the Mediapart website since December, the president had finally seen him resign as budget minister two weeks ago when French investigators stepped up their investigation process. But that is not enough to spare the president from painful fallout.
Opposition politicians are now asking two questions of Hollande: did he for months naively believe his budget minister and friend when he "looked into his eyes" and denied the account? Or was Hollande complicit in a cover-up?
The president went on TV to condemn Cahuzac and deny any part in a cover-up. But pollsters said that even if the president's worst failing was to have been naively taken in, being hoodwinked by a tax-evader he appointed to one of the country's most important jobs would be hugely damaging for his presidential standing and authority. "A minister lying to his president would not have been possible under François Mitterrand," the Ifop pollster Jerome Fourquet told Le Nouvel Observateur.