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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.

11 of 671 comments (clear)

  1. Bad day to be Putin by Lisandro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Congratulations to the French people.

  2. Re:Good on France by DaHat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Good on France by Lisandro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As much as drive-by shootings are the national past time in the US.

    Wait, sorry. I said something really stupid.

  4. Re:Good on France by penandpaper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Only in Chicago and other cities with the strongest of gun laws.

  5. Re:Glad to see a little sanity by Lisandro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This had to be said: how Macron will perform as a president is a giant question mark. This is the first public office the guy will hold.

    What makes his win refreshing is that the alternative was Marine fucking Le Pen. In that sense this campaign was reminiscent to the Clinton-Trump election, i.e., a decision between a mediocre candidate and an unfathomable one. Guess the French were wiser this time around.

  6. Re:Sad day for Europe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Kebabs are pretty tasty. Lots of people like Kebabs. You would also if you tasted one, but its hard to taste food when your head is up your ass.

    You can whine all you want about SJWs or political correctness, but there is nothing sensible about fascism. There is nothing sensible about ISIS either. Not all muslims are extremists and not all extremists are muslim. Those are very simple truths that you choose to refute.

    One extremist begets another. And so on. At least the French are more aware of this than Americans.

    Egalité, fraternité, liberté. Vive la France!

  7. Re:Good on France by ChromeAeonium · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Europe also has better access to healthcare (including mental healthcare), better social welfare, less class inequality, less gang activity, and generally ranks better on all the other things that lead to violent crime. I'm not sure how you can compare the two situations and blame the guns. Even between areas in the US, gun crime tends to happen more toward urban areas with lots of social problems, and not so much in the backwoods rural areas were everyone and their grandmother is carrying a gun.

  8. Re:Good on France by ooloorie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now explain Trump's victory.

    Easy: Hillary was corrupt, incompetent, dishonest, war-mongering, and a party-hack. Bozo the Clown would have been a better choice than Hillary.

    Macron doesn't strike me as the brightest bulb, but if the Democrats had put up anybody like him, they would likely have won in the US as well.

  9. Re:Good on France by haruchai · · Score: 5, Funny

    " Bozo the Clown would have been a better choice"
    That's exactly who got elected. How's he doing so far?

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  10. Re:Glad to see a little sanity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  11. Re:not surprising by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did you ever stop to think that's because maybe, no matter how much you may wish to moan about everything, this is as good as it gets?

    I know, I know, you want to listen to the fascist who tells you she can solve all the worlds ills if we just blame it on those guys.

    Yeah, Europe tried that, didn't work well, turns out it was actually much worse than what everyone is sticking to instead. Rather than assume everyone is an ignorant drone and you're the only enlightened person on the planet, maybe you should consider that in fact there's a good reason that people vote for the status quo that's made them the 5th richest nation in the world despite having a fraction of the world's population and resources to achieve that success?

    Yes, I know, it's all terrible, everything's awful with the liberal West, it's terrible, sure, great, only it's just less terrible than all the alternatives. Even in the modern era you only have to look at Putin's Russia to see how awful the autocratic miserable hate filled blame gaming alternative is. I don't know about you but I'd much rather be at the bottom of the wealth ladder in somewhere like France, than at the bottom of the wealth ladder in Russia. That's why people rejected Le Pen, because no matter how bad things may appear to be in somewhere like France, no matter how much you may wish to whine about, no matter where on the wealth ladder you sit, you're still better off, and more free, than you would be under the alternative that was on offer.