Le Pen Concedes Defeat To Macron In France's Post-Hack Election (reuters.com)

"France has voted for continuity," candidate Marine Le Pen said in the wake of her defeat in France's presidential election, conceding that Emmanuel Macron had a decisive lead. Reuters has ongoing coverage of Le Pen's concession phone call and reactions from world leaders. "France Rejects Far Right," read a headline at CNN, touting their own live updates and early results showing Macron with a 65.9% to 34.1% lead, "on course for a decisive win." Macron is schedule to speak at the Louvre museum (where the grounds were "briefly evacuated" this morning after discovery of a suspicious bag.) Quartz is calling 39-year-old Macron "the second Generation X president of a major world power" (after Canada's Justin Trudeau).

The election was closely watched after a 9-gigabyte trove of emails from Macron's campaign were leaked online. CNBC reports that "One of the most talked about emails makes reference to binge-watching Dr. Who and masturbating to the sound of running water. It sounds generally incoherent. It could be false, or maybe the person wrote it after a few too many." The New Yorker traces the leak to a right-leaning Canadian site, whose editor says he found the documents on 4chan. But Reuters is crediting WikiLeaks with providing "the largest boost of attention" to the leaked documents, according to an analysis pubished by the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a D.C.-based think tank on international affairs. WikiLeaks tweeted about the leak 15 times, bragging to Reuters that "we were hours ahead of all other major outlets." On Friday WikiLeaks also disputed the Macron campaign's claim that the leak mixed real documents with fake ones. "We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us."

Saturday WikiLeaks noted that several of the Office files "have Cyrillic meta data. Unclear if by design, incompetence, or Slavic employee." And Saturday afternoon they added "name of employee for Russian govt security contractor Evrika appears 9 times in metadata for 'xls_cendric.rar' leak archive."

Meanwhile, on the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet voted from space. Feel free to discuss the election's results in the comments.

Comments

Re:Good on France

[DaHat]

Enjoy your weekly car fires and terrorist attacks.

He did kind of signal that that was the future they can look forward to.

This threat, this imponderable problem, is part of our daily lives for the years to come.

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[dcollins]

Based on what? He's never held public office and my very-left French partner (who campaigned hard for Hillary) has been calling him "nothing but a wet noodle".

Re:Good on France

[Sique]

Fun fact: This is utterly wrong. Or a lie. Or alternative facts.

The 26th most popular boy's name in Germany 2016 was Alexander. Mohammed doesn't even make the top 50.

Re:Bye bye France

[MightyMartian]

Muslims have been in France for over a century. Unsurprising as France invaded and colonized the lands in which they lived.

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary would have been fine. Both her and Macron are now what we describe as proudly Neoliberal - That is they support evidence based economic policy tempered with progressive policy where the market does not not produce a fair or desirable outcome.

You know neoliberal ideals are on to something when they catch shit from far-left Berniebro socialists and far-right Trumpette fascists.

Globalist? Free trade? Yeah. Fuck yeah. Fucking proudly motherfucker. Nothing has done more to bring more people out of poverty than global free trade.

Re:Good on France

[Anonymous Coward]

Populist and far-right voters are older, in their forties and above, and generally misinformed.

Actually, le Menchion and le Pen were the leading candidates among young voters in the first round. Those who have never known prosperity are not buying the bullshit anymore.

Re:Good on France

[ClickOnThis]

You are a partially literate idiot.
Homicide rate vs total homicides.

Europe has more homicides [than the USA].

Nope. Whether you count homicide rate or total homicides, USA wins.

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[MightyMartian]

Even if what you say is true, what of it? The French voted in a way to express their desire to remain in the EU. It's that simple.

You seem, some electorates are capable of looking beyond the political leader as an individual, and at the actual ideal itself, and a majority of French voters made it clear they had absolutely no desire to turn their country over to a far right nationalist who wanted to pull France out of the EU (even if, as it became clear she was losing, Le Pen tried to fabricate a European-friendly face).

The National Front are a pack of anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis. In a way, it's irrelevant whether Macron has any of your supposedly required experience for leading (I mean, he was only a former banker and economic minister, so what does he know, eh?), the fact is that he represents moderation and pro-European sentiment.

False

[Nova Express]

The Panama Papers revealed extensive, documented financial ties between Putin and Clinton cronies:

Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage the Podestas and their well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.

Which is exactly what Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, did this spring. As reported at the end of March, the Podesta Group registered with the U.S. Government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, naming three Podesta Group staffers: Tony Podesta plus Stephen Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign, the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November.

Sberbank (Savings Bank in Russian) engaged the Podesta Group to help its public image—leading Moscow financial institutions not exactly being known for their propriety and wholesomeness—and specifically to help lift some of the pain of sanctions placed on Russia in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine, which has caused real pain to the country’s hard-hit financial sector.

It’s hardly surprising that Sberbank sought the help of Democratic insiders like the Podesta Group to aid them in this difficult hour, since they clearly understand how American politics work. The question is why the Podesta Group took Sberbank’s money. That financial institution isn’t exactly hiding in the shadows—it’s the biggest bank in Russia, and its reputation leaves a lot to be desired. Nobody acquainted with Russian finance was surprised that Sberbank wound up in the Panama Papers.

And that is just one of the many documented financial ties between Podesta/Clinton and Putin's regime.

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[Zumbs]

This is the first public office the guy will hold.

According to wikipedia, he was Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs in France 26 August 2014 – 30 August 2016. I think that counts as a public office?

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[Anonymous Coward]

"The National Front are a pack of anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis"

It will be difficult to convince Louis Aliot (Jewish grandfather https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Aliot) and David Rachline (Jewish Ukrainian grandparents https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rachline), both top-level leaders of the Front National.

Re:Glad to see a little sanity

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, by far the largest numbers of Syrian refugees are in Islamic countries. The top three destinations are Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Germany is #4, then it's Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, and Egypt.

So to say "they're being routed to Europe" is kinda - well, not true.

Re:Good on France

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe also tends to be more ethnically homogeneous (per country). The U.S., for all its flaws, is a hodgepodge of people from all over the world. I've always suspected part of the high violence rate in the U.S. is due to latent racism and cultural biases present everywhere, but coming into conflict with each other much more in the U.S. than in other countries.

The problem with that argument is simple: You haven't shown that inter-cultural exchanges are compromising a number of homicides.

So basically, not only are you still slipping on causation, you haven't established correlation.

The counterargument would be Canada, which is more diverse than the U.S., yet has less violence. But if you stare at that map and a homicide rate map long enough, I think you'll convince yourself that Canada is an outlier, and that in general higher ethnic diversity in a country is correlated with higher violence rates.

Stare too long into the abyss, and you'll find it staring back, doesn't make it true or valid.

The least you could do is check your own assumptions, but you didn't.

We still have a long ways to go as a species.

One would hope so, we haven't even gotten close to becoming a worm. Which was we all know, is the pinnacle of evolution.

Re:Good on France

[Tough Love]

And a self-admitted sexual abuser.

Re: Good on France

[Anonymous Coward]

Utter bullshit. I live in Switzerland and often travel all over the continent. There're no "tight immigration controls and border checks" - you can take a train and cross the German/French/Italian without anyone even asking for your passport. In fact, people here often travel back and forth to Germany just for shopping.

Re:Because open borders have worked so well for th

[Kiuas]

You can deny it all you want, but it will happen during your lifetime. They reproduce like rabbits.

This argument is so unfounded in reality that it now has its own Snopes aricle detailing why it's BS, quoting a couple relevant parts:

"France: 1.8 children per family; Muslims, 8.1"

The French government doesn’t collect statistics by religion, so it is impossible to say what the precise fertility rates among different religious groups in France are.

But no country on earth has such a high fertility rate, and in Algeria and Morocco, the two nations which send the largest numbers of Muslim immigrants to France, the fertility rate is 2.38, according to the UN’s 2008 figures. - -

"In the Netherlands, 50% of all newborns are Muslim."

As of 2004, Muslims comprised about 5.8% of the population of the Netherlands. In order for this small percentage of the population to account for “50% of all newborns,” Muslim women in the Netherlands would have to be giving birth, on average, to about 14 to 16 times as many babies each as non-Muslim women. - -

"Currently in Belgium, 25% of the population and 50% of all newborns are Muslim."

Muslims are the second-largest religious group in Belgium, but they still only account for about 4%-5% of the population. And, as noted above, for that small a segment of the population to be accounting for “50% of all newborns” in the country, Muslim women would have to be giving birth to incredibly large numbers of children each. - -

One fact that gets lost among distractions is that the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe — and around the world — have been falling significantly for some time.
[S]harp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years.

There are valid concerns with regards to immigration and integration of immigrants from everywhere (including eastern Europe) but this assumption that somehow the muslims will 'outbreed' other Europeans is statistically entirely unfounded and based on numbers that the far.right blogosphere has pulled out of their ass.