Marine Le Pen
© JEREMIAS GONZALEZ/APMarine Le Pen, the National Rally candidate, campaigns in Saint-Pierre-en-Auge, Normandy, before Sunday’s run-off vote
Almost a third of Marine Le Pen's voters believe that the French presidential election has been rigged, according to an opinion poll.

The survey by the Ifop institute underlined widespread distrust with the electoral process, notably among supporters of the populist National Rally candidate.

The findings were published as Le Pen, 53, prepared to face President Macron, 44, in a televised debate tomorrow before the second round of voting on Sunday.

A total of 14 per cent of voters said the result of the election would be falsified, Ifop found. Another 31 per cent said they did not know and just 55 per cent were confident that there would be no fraud.

Among Le Pen's voters, 30 per cent thought that the election was rigged.

Distrust was also high among people who backed other populist candidates such as Éric Zemmour, 63, the anti-Islam pundit, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 70, the leader of the radical left-wing France Unbowed party, who were both eliminated in the first round of the election on April 10.

Only 7 per cent of Macron's supporters thought that the outcome would be influenced by cheating.

The findings echo polls conducted in America which show that a majority of Republican voters remain convinced that President Biden stole the 2020 election, despite a lack of evidence to substantiate the allegation.


Comment: Which he did.


Le Pen has been careful to avoid following the example of President Trump, who has given credence to the claims of fraud. Even if she loses to Macron in the runoff, the National Rally leader is unlikely to publicise the allegations for fear of undermining her drive to give her once toxic movement a veneer of respectability.

There are marked differences between the French and American systems. Electronic votes of the sort that caused controversy in the US, for instance, are banned in France. The postal voting system that was at the centre of Trump's claims in America was also abolished five decades ago in France after the discovery of electoral fraud on an "industrial scale" on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. It was replaced by a system of proxy voting that has never been seriously contested.
macron
© LUDOVIC MARIN/GETTYMacron, above with supporters in Paris, has been accused online of planning to steal the election
Nevertheless, a total of 70 per cent of Le Pen's voters believed that it was possible to rig a French presidential election, the poll found. Among the electorate as a whole, the figure was 48 per cent.

The survey followed weeks of online speculation that Macron was planning to "steal the election".

The speculation in France circulated on social media, notably on Facebook and Telegram channels fed by antivaxer movements and supporters of the yellow vests, who held violent protests against Macron in 2018 and 2019. It was also fuelled by politicians such as Florian Philippot, 40, a populist who split with the National Rally. He said last month that Macron's supporters would try to rig the election but would be thwarted.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, 61, a Eurosceptic candidate eliminated in the first round after obtaining 2.1 per cent of the vote, also said the election was "rigged from A to Z". His argument was that Macron had been favoured by the national media, although his choice of words was seized on by conspiracy theorists to support their claims of fraud.