Emmanuel Macron, the independent centrist who is favourite to become the next president of France, has filed a formal complaint following remarks by his far-right rival Marine Le Pen during a live TV debate on Wednesday night implying that he had an offshore account in the Caribbean.
A member of Macron’s entourage said the campaign would “not hesitate to prosecute for defamation” anyone who repeated the claims in public.
Paris prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into whether fake news was being used to influence Sunday’s election runoff.
During the heated and sometimes vicious debate, Le Pen told Macron she hoped “we will not find out that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas” – apparently a reference to documents circulating on the internet that linked Macron to a Caribbean bank and were easily identifiable as forgeries. Macron swiftly rejected the comment as “defamation”.
According to a snap poll by French broadcaster BFMTV, 63% of viewers thought Macron had come out on top in the two-and-a-half-hour debate – a result roughly in line with the outcome pollsters are predicting on Sunday.
Le Pen, who dodged eggs thrown by a small group of about 50 protesters chanting “Jail Marine” and “Le Pen out” as she arrived at a transport company in the Brittany town of Dol-de-Bretagne on Thursday, insisted that she had not accused her opponent of having a secret offshore bank account.
“Not at all,” the Front National candidate told BFMTV. “If I wanted to do so, I would have done it yesterday. I’ve just asked him the question. If I had proof, I would have claimed it yesterday.”
Macron, who largely succeeded in keeping his cool during the debate in the face of a no-holds-barred verbal onslaught from Le Pen, said in a radio interview that the insinuations were “fake news and lies” from “websites, some of which are linked to Russian interests”.
The provenance of the conspiracy theory is not clear, but there are signs tying the faked documents to far-right circles in California.
Associated Press (AP) reported that one of the documents purports to have been drawn up under the laws of the Caribbean island of Nevis, but actually draws some of its language from a guide to forming limited-liability companies in California. The documents first appeared on Mixtape, a relatively new northern California-based filesharing service.
In the documents, the “M” in Macron’s purported signature does not match his genuine sign-off, AP reported. Metadata embedded in the document suggested it was created just before being posted online, undermining the anonymous poster’s claim to have circulated the documents to “hundreds of French journalists” who had “all sat on this”.
The Macron campaign identified the first tweet referring to the documents as coming from the Twitter account of a far-right activist and convicted felon based in northern California.
As the presidential campaign entered its fraught final stretch, Le Pen’s estranged father, Jean-Marie – who reached the runoff himself in 2002 – appeared to undermine his daughter’s efforts, saying she had “failed to rise to the occasion” during her televised exchanges with Macron, which were watched by 16 million people.
“I always want my champion to win hands-down,” the 88-year-old Front National founder said, judging the face-off “a draw” and saying that his daughter, who ejected him from the party, may have been let down by advisers who had underestimated a “very solid” Macron and hoped for “a collapse or psychological meltdown” that never happened.
Barack Obama also weighed in on the election on Thursday, saying in a message posted on Macron’s Twitter account that he was endorsing the centrist “because of how important this election is”.
The former US president said: “I’m not planning to get involved in many elections now that I don’t have to run for office again, but the French election is very important to the future of France and the values that we care so much about.”
He added: “I have admired the campaign that Emmanuel Macron has run. He has stood up for liberal values. He put forward the vision for the important role that France plays in Europe and around the world. And he has committed to a better future for French people. He appeals to people’s hopes, and not their fears.”
Obama ended his message with the words En Marche – the name of Macron’s youthful political movement – and “Vive la France!”
The TV debate was widely criticised in French media as possibly the worst and certainly the most invective-filled in the history of the event, which has been staged during every election since 1974 except for 2002, when Jacques Chirac refused to confront Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Le Pen claimed that Macron was a “smirking banker” who was soft on Islamist terror and bent on sacrificing France on the altar of big business, while Macron hit back by describing his rival as “hate-filled”, dishonest, unworthy of the office of president and dangerous for an already deeply divided France.
Newspapers and media commentators were critical of the far-right candidate’s “permanent aggression” and “constant provocations”, with even ultra-conservative publications normally sympathetic to her cause saying they found her performance “unconvincing” and “disappointing”.
The left-leaning Libération accused Le Pen of “multiplying attacks and provocations … and thus avoiding any serious debate”. The paper’s former foreign editor Pierre Haski said she had invented a new tactic: “debate trolling”.
