PARIS (AP) – The Latest on France’s presidential runoff on Sunday between centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen (all times local):
8 a.m.
Voting in the French presidential runoff has begun in France’s overseas territories amid a nationwide blackout on campaigning and media coverage that could sway voters’ views. It moves to the mainland on Sunday.
The first French territory involved in the early voting was Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an archipelago located near the Canadian island of Newfoundland, where polling stations opened Saturday morning.
Early voting in other far-flung French overseas territories and French embassies abroad was expected later in the day.
In the presidential runoff, voters are choosing between centrist Emmanuel Macron’s business-friendly, pro-European vision and far-right Marine Le Pen’s protectionist, closed-borders view that resonates with workers left behind by globalization.
___
6 a.m.
The French presidential campaign has been unusually bitter, with voters hurling eggs and flour, protesters clashing with police and candidates insulting each other on national television – a reflection of the widespread public disaffection with politics.
Marine Le Pen, 48, has brought her far-right National Front party, once a pariah for its racism and anti-Semitism, closer than ever to the French presidency, seizing on working-class voters’ growing frustration with globalization and immigration. Even if she loses in Sunday’s runoff, she is likely to be a powerful opposition figure in France’s parliamentary election in June.
On Sunday she faces 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron, who also helped upend France’s traditional political structure with his wild-card campaign.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, Le Pen said, win or lose, “we changed everything.”
Many voters, however, don’t like either Le Pen or Macron. They fear her party’s racist past while worrying that his platform would demolish worker job protections.
___
6 a.m.
The hacking attack and leak of both fake and real documents from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign began late Friday, just before France’s required campaign news blackout descended at midnight.
Someone on 4chan – a site known for, among other things, cruel hoaxes and political extremism – posted links to a large set of data which the poster claimed had come from Macron’s campaign. Macron’s campaign swiftly confirmed it had been hacked some weeks ago, and that at least some of the documents were genuine.
Macron’s team is slamming the hack as an effort to “seed doubt and disinformation” and destabilize the French presidential vote on Sunday where he faces Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party.
A top National Front official, Florian Philippot, asked in a tweet, “will the #Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism deliberately buried?”
The French election commission is meeting Saturday on the hack and the leak.
A voting watchdog urged the French Interior Ministry late Friday to look into claims by the Le Pen campaign that some of her ballot papers were being tampered with to benefit Macron.