Voting for the next president of France has begun in some overseas territories.
As the polls opened Brigitte Trogneux, the wife of French presidential election candidate for the En Marche! movement Emmanuel Macron, greeted supporters outside her home in Le Touquet.
The first French territories to vote were Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an archipelago located near Newfoundland, French Guiana and the French West Indies.
Mr Macron and Marine Le Pen have been involved in an increasingly bitter contest, accusing each other of being unfit to live up to the grandeur of the French presidency.
But in the last 24 hours voting was overshadowed by a ‘massive and coordinated’ hacking attempt on candidate Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign.
French Presidential candidate Macron was 15 years old when he had his first tentative encounter with wife-to-be, Brigitte Trogneux.
She was his drama teacher, married and 25 years his senior. She is 64 while her husband is 39.
Then known as Brigitte Auziere, the married mother of three taught French literature in the northern French town of Amiens, where Emmanuel Macron attended a Catholic high school.
Although she never was assigned as his teacher, she was in charge of the high school drama club when he joined. They got to know each other when the 16-year-old Emmanuel suggested they write a play together.
Early voting in overseas territories in the Pacific Ocean and some French embassies abroad will begin later on Saturday.
A 44-hour legal blackout on campaigning began Friday at midnight and is due to last until 8pm on Sunday when the last polling stations close on the mainland and the first pollsters’ projections and official partial results are expected.
After ditching France’s traditional left-right main political parties in a first-round election, voters are now choosing between Macron’s business-friendly, pro-European vision and Le Pen’s protectionist, closed-borders view that resonates with workers left behind by globalization.
The future of the European Union may hinge on the vote, also seen as a test for global populism.
This comes after Macron announced Russian hackers launched a ‘massive and coordinated’ bid to destabilise his campaign just moments before a ban on media reports liable to affect the presidential race.
Nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting.
The French presidential forerunner made the eleventh hour announcement at 11.56pm – four minutes before the legal prohibition on campaigning was put in place.
Slamming the hack as an effort to ‘seed doubt and disinformation’ and destabilize the presidential vote, Macron’s movement En Marche said it would ‘take all measures’ to shed light on what happened.
It recalled similar leaks from Hillary Clinton’s U. S. presidential campaign.
In other voting issues, the French voting watchdog called on the Interior Ministry late Friday to look into claims by the Le Pen campaign of tampering with ballot papers in a way that favors Macron.
The Le Pen campaign said administrators in several regions who receive ballot papers for both candidates have found the Le Pen ballots ‘systematically torn up.’
The French presidential campaign has been unusually bitter, with voters hurling eggs and flour, protesters clashing with police and the candidates insulting each other on national television – a reflection of the deep divisions and public disaffection with politics.
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, she is likely to be a powerful opposition figure in the upcoming parliamentary election campaign.
‘We changed everything,’ win or lose, Le Pen said in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday.
Macron, a former economy minister and investment banker who has never held elected office, also helped upend France’s traditional political structure with his wild-card campaign outside standard parties.
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 job protections for workers. Students in several Paris schools protested Friday against both the candidates.
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