French former minister says country's politics 'corrupt and full of cronyism' Dominique Voynet, a founding member of the Greens in France, said she would not be running for re-election as mayor of the Paris suburb of Montreuil because she saw no difference in treatment between "politicians who refuse corruption, cronyism, sectarianism and toadying to special interests" and those who embrace it. "I refuse to campaign by promising housing and town hall jobs to all and sundry, as some of my rivals have been doing for months; to promise to any person met in the street that their request, even botched, will placed on the top of the pile," she said. (I refuse) to promise each leader of local associations who shamelessly brings up upcoming elections a raise in their annual subsidies. When asked whether she was speaking solely about her constituency and her Left-wing rivals, she said: "I think that it's exacerbated in Montreuil but speaking to other mayors I get the impression it's the same elsewhere." This is a wake up call. We are denouncing a system that is feeding current populism and that is feeding votes for the extremes. According to a Polling Vox survey out this week, some 42 per cent of French people don't rule out the possibility of voting for the far-Right Front National in next the elections next March. Miss Voynet said was proud of being the only politician in France to be elected mayor of a town of more than 100,000 inhabitants without the support of a major political party. She would have been running against Razzy Hammadi, a Socialist backed by Claude Bartolone, the Socialist speaker of the National Assembly and a close confidante of president François Hollande. In a clear reference to Mr Bartolone, she intimated she faced a smear campaign from the Left because she had "stubbornly refused to kiss the ring of any godfather."