Fake news allegations
Macron is the man to beat, especially after he proved his presidential mettle in Thursday’s debate with Le Pen, rising above her low blows and showing voters that he might, after all, ably lead this nuclear- armed nation and stand up to Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
Pollsters, bookmakers and financial traders calculate that Le Pen would have to accomplish a miracle to overcome an estimated 20- point poll gap.
But after Britons chose Brexit and Americans chose Trump, no one can Allegations of fake news and hacking attempts dominated France’s tense presidential campaign yesterday.
Paris prosecutors launched an investigation into whether fake news was being used to influence tomorrow’s vote.
There has been intense anxiety in France over the possibility that viral misinformation or hackers could influence the presidential vote, as in the US election last year.
Yesterday, frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign filed a suit against an unknown source “X” after his rival Marine Le Pen suggested during their only one- on- one debate on Thursday that the former banker could have an offshore account.
“I hope we won’t find out you have an offshore account in the Bahamas,” Le Pen said during the tense prime- time showdown.
She appeared to be referring to two sets of apparent forgeries, published just hours earlier, that purported to show Macron was somehow involved with a Caribbean bank and a firm based on the island of Nevis.
Macron’s camp said the former investment banker was the victim of a “cybermisinformation campaign”.
Voting starts at 8am Sunday local time ( 6pm tomorrow NZT)
Partial results and polling agency projections are expected from 6am Monday NZT be sure what will happen tomorrow, when France’s 47 million voters cast ballots from the beaches of Tahiti to the farms of Brittany and the cobblestoned streets of Paris.
Macron tweeted a video yesterday warning: “The worst is not impossible.”
The big question is how many of his detractors will hold their noses and choose Macron just to keep Le Pen’s far- right National Front party out of power.
Many on the left see Macron as a marionette of the financial elite; many on the right see him as a repackaged version of his former boss, the crushingly unpopular Socialist President Hollande. If enough of those voters stay home on election day, that might put Le Pen in the Elysee Palace. The campaign has essentially been a referendum on Le Pen and her ideas — her plans to close French borders, use francs instead of euros, rethink France’s role in the European Union, ally with Putin’s Russia and Assad’s Syria and drastically curtail immigration.
One of its many surprises: For the first time in modern France, the incumbent refused to seek re- election. Hollande feared his single- digit approval ratings would hurt his Socialist Party’s chances of winning. The party still went into a freefall, and its candidate flopped.
Another surprise: The conservative Republicans, after relishing the likely prospect of retaking the Elysee Palace this year, melted down. Presumptive nominee Alain Juppe lost the party primary to the harder- line Francois Fillon. Then Fillon went from frontrunner to hasbeen over a whirlwind few days, thanks to a newspaper’s allegations Macron’s final campaign stretch got off to a shaky start, as Le Pen undercut his visit to a Whirlpool factory slated to send its jobs to Poland. But he then assumed moral authority at wartime memorial sites, reminding voters that Le Pen’s father, her political mentor, has downplayed the Holocaust and France’s shameful Nazi collaboration.
The climax of the campaign may have been Thursday’s debate, when 15 million French tuned in to see if Le Pen would crush Macron alive. She didn’t.
While a Macron presidency looks increasingly likely, it would not be easy.
He would need all his youthful energy and optimism to heal a deeply divided France, with Le Pen in place as a formidable political opponent. He would need to assemble a parliamentary majority from the remains of the left and right in legislative elections just a month away. And he would face tenacious union resistance to his plans to overhaul France’s labour rules and create elusive jobs.
France would remain in a state of emergency, girding against Islamic extremist attacks, and the EU would still face the deep- seated problems that fuelled Brexit and populism in the first place.
Voting starts in French overseas territories today then moves to the mainland tomorrow, with 50,000 security forces on guard. Polling agency projections of the outcome are expected as soon as the final voting stations close Sunday at 8pm local time ( 6am Monday NZT), followed by official results.