○ [Update-1] Obama backs Macron in last-minute intervention in French election | The Guardian |

○ [Update-2] France Election: Fake News As It Happened

    Originated online in California, just before the 2.5 hour debate between Le Pen and Macron.

Aggressive stance with lack of economic basics will lead to the populist’s downfall in the Sunday election. Where it took America 18 months of electioneering to choose the wrong candidate, the French most likely will settle on the better candidate after a fortnight. The 2.5 hour debate, where the gloves came off early, was a bruising battle with a clear win for Macron. Le Pen needs a miracle after a bruising night. She even made an attempt to libel Macron for stashing capital in an off-shore account with no evidence whatsoever. Pulling an 11th hour “Fillon” during the debate will likely seal her fate.

Macron deemed winner of fierce final TV debate with Le Pen | France24 |

The debate climax of this twist-after-twist French presidential campaign was loud, fast, personal, riven with inaccuracies and thin on substance — and the candidate likeliest to become France’s next president, Emmanuel Macron, won the day.

National Front candidate Marine Le Pen came out swinging in her opening remarks, calling Macron “the candidate of wild globalisation, Uber-isation, precariousness, social brutality, the war of all against all”. From the start, she tarred the centrist former economy minister as an heir-in-waiting to unpopular outgoing Socialist President François Hollande.

The 39-year-old Macron, too, was keen to paint Le Pen, 48, as an heiress to her father, National Front founder and rabble-rouser Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech over a political career that spanned into his 80s.  

After tense debate, France finds Macron more convincing: poll | DW |

A poll taken after the presidential debate has suggested the ex-economy minister outperformed his far-right rival. More often than not, policy positions turned to personal insults during the tumultuous encounter.

An opinion poll for French broadcaster BFMTV found that 63 percent of viewers found banker-turned-politician Emmanuel Macron more convincing in Wednesday’s presidential debate.

Only 34 percent of those polled found far-right leader Marine Le Pen more convincing in the final presidential debate before Sunday’s run-off vote.

During the debate, the two rivals launched personal insults and attacked each other’s manifestos as they faced off in the final TV debate.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen hit out at her centrist opponent Macron’s record as a former economy minister, accusing him of playing a key role in selling off several of France’s state-led companies.

In response, Macron accused his rival of misleading voters about his record. Furthermore, he accused Le Pen of having no experience in economic issues and no workable ideas.

‘More like a boxing match’: French papers react to presidential debate

Marine Le Pen accused of deploying ‘Russian-made fake news’ against Emmanuel Macron | The Independent |

Marine Le Pen has been accused of using “fake news” during a head-to-head debate with Emmanuel Macron days before the final vote of France’s presidential election.

Ms Le Pen, who has been described by French commentators as adopting “a Donald Trump style” during the televised debate, alluded to allegations that Mr Macron has an offshore account in the Bahamas.

Before the two candidates took part in the virulent exchange watched by 15 million people, an article suggesting Mr Macron was engaging in tax evasion in the Caribbean haven was published on the right wing website Disobedient Media and started to circulate on social media.

Ms Le Pen raised the allegations in the debate and challenged Mr Macron on whether they were true. Asked on BFM TV on Thursday morning if she had any proof to justify repeating the claims, she admitted she did not.

More below the fold …

In French Elections, Alt-Right Messages and Memes Don’t Translate | NY Times |

On an online message board frequented by extremists in the United States, an anonymous user last month urged others to bombard social media sites in France in support of Marine Le Pen, the far-right French candidate, by using memes, hashtags and other digital tricks that they successfully employed during last year’s American presidential election. Within days, the online thread — and similar discussions across the internet — was flooded with hundreds of users in the United States offering to help the digital campaign.

But the American tactics have not translated overseas.

Despite such efforts, the far right in the United States and elsewhere has so far failed to reach much of the French electorate ahead of the country’s vote this weekend, according to a review of social media activity done for The New York Times. The analysis, which was based on a review of millions of Twitter messages related to the election since last summer, showed that more than one-third of posts linked to certain political hashtags originated from the United States, although few went viral in France.

“There’s a big cultural gap that these groups have to jump over to expand their message,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, who has studied the far right’s recent efforts in France. “The language and iconography of the alt-right is pretty specific. Most of it just isn’t going to translate well.”

The French presidential election is the latest front in the digital assault by the American far right or alt-right [NYT], a diverse and loosely connected group of internet-based radicals who have garnered attention by using memes — online satirical photographs with often biting captions — and other tactics to further their views worldwide. The activists, a combination of white supremacists, anti-Semitic campaigners and other far-right types, were closely linked to the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, although the extent of their influence remains unclear.

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