Emmanuel Macron is facing calls for a parliamentary inquiry, after the Uber files exposed his extraordinary efforts as French economy minister under his predecessor as president, François Hollande, to help the US cab-hailing company lobby against the closed-shop taxi industry.
French opposition politicians from the left and far right seized on reports of secret undeclared meetings and the promise of a “deal” brokered by Macron inside the government to help Uber.
The revelations contained in the Uber files – a cache of 124,000 company documents leaked to the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – come at a difficult time for Macron’s centrists, who lost control of parliament in last month’s legislative elections.
Several figures from the left to the far right, as well as the leader of the leftwing CGT trade union, called for a parliamentary inquiry.
The files suggest pro-business Macron, who was re-elected French president in April, was close enough to Uber’s managers during his two years in the economy ministry from 2014 to 2016 for them not to think twice about contacting him for possible help when their premises were raided by tax and other authorities.
Macron, who promised in his first successful presidential campaign to make France a “startup nation”, failed to record at least three of four meetings with Uber’s chief executive and founder, Travis Kalanick, that were detailed in the files.
While serving as economy minister, the former banker told the tech company he had brokered a secret “deal” with a bitterly divided Socialist cabinet, then in power.
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: "We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come."
Aurélien Taché, a member of parliament who was elected for Macron’s party in 2017 but re-elected this year as part of the leftwing opposition coalition, Nupes, told France Info radio: “It’s almost like a bad thriller – meetings and rendezvous that were hidden …” He said that the fact the company asked Macron for advice during a raid on their offices by government inspectors must be investigated. “It’s a state scandal,” he said.
Alain Vidalies, who was the Socialist transport secretary at the time Uber was attempting to establish itself in France, told France Info he was “gobsmacked” by the extent of Macron’s support of Uber lobbying, particularly that Macron had taken part in “quasi-secret” meetings with the company, which he called a type of “complicity”. He said the French people had a right to “a response and clarifications” from the executive.
Mathilde Panot, the parliamentary leader of the hard-left opposition party France Unbowed, denounced what she described as the “pillage of the country” during Macron’s time as economy minister. She described Macron as a “lobbyist” for a “US multinational aiming to permanently deregulate labour law”.
In a parliament sitting on Monday afternoon, Panot referenced the Uber files while presenting her party’s no-confidence vote in the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne. Panot concluded by asking lawmakers if they agreed with Macron, whom she called “the president of lobbyists” in his support of Uber.
Fabien Roussel, leader of the French Communist party, described the revelations, which were detailed in Le Monde, as devastating: “Against all our rules, all our social laws and against workers’ rights.”
Members of the lower house of the French parliament accepted that there was no constitutional mechanism for them to question Macron directly on the content of the Uber files, but opposition parties suggested it was important for parliament committees to establish a way to investigate.
The head of the leftwing CGT union, Philippe Martinez, said: “The minimum is that [Macron] explains what he did and how he contributed not just to Uber establishing itself in France but, thanks to a law called the ‘Macron law’, also contributed to unpicking a part of the labour code in favour of this type of economic activity with social consequences on workers.”
However, Laurent Berger, head of the moderate CFDT union, said it was no surprise to hear to what extent Uber had a “lobbying mindset” in order to “deregulate, to make money by taking so little account of what exists in terms of law in different countries, and above all in terms of workers’ rights”.
Jordan Bardella, of the far-right National Rally party, said the revelations showed that Macron’s career had “a common thread: to serve private interests, often foreign, before national interests”.
The president’s office told AFP that at that time Macron had, as economy minister, “naturally” been in contact with “many companies involved in the profound change in services that has occurred over the years mentioned, which should be facilitated by unravelling certain administrative or regulatory locks”.
It was not a secret that Macron was enthusiastic about US tech companies, who he saw as outsiders and innovators. He once told Mediapart that banning Uber would have been tantamount to sending unemployed youths from the rundown banlieues “back there to sell drugs”.
But his closeness to the cab-hailing firm has never been fully revealed. Macron showed a “clear desire to work around the [new] Thévenoud legislation”, according to Uber’s note of a meeting with the young economy minister about a law that radically restricted the role of cab-hailing services.
Macron’s support was crucial for Uber, as it ran into street protests from French taxi drivers, who must do 300 hours of training and face a limited quota of expensive taxi licenses.
Aurore Bergé, the parliamentary leader of Macron’s centrist party, said Macron had simply been doing his job and doing it well. She told CNews that Uber had created a service that French people wanted and Macron had rightly facilitated the arrival of companies that created jobs. On accusations of a secret deal, she said: “There was no deal, there was no quid pro quo.”
