This April 20, 2022, Marine Le Pen had an appointment with Emmanuel Macron in front of the cameras of TF1 and France 2 for the debate between two rounds of the presidential election co-presented by Léa Salamé and Gilles Bouleau. Prepared more energetically for this event that she had missed five years ago by her own admission, the leader of the National Rally had the ambition to show that she had the stature to preside over the country. For the moment, the outgoing president is credited with 56.5% of voting intentions in the second round against 43.5% for his far-right opponent according to the daily Ipsos-Sopra Steria poll for franceinfo and Le Parisien-Today in France. However, the political leader who arrived with 23.41% of the vote behind the incumbent leader (27.6%) in the first round was ridiculed on social networks after a confusing intervention.
She expected it: Marine Le Pen was attacked on her relationship with Vladimir Putin, at a time when the world sees Ukraine attacked by its Russian neighbor since February 24th. Emmanuel Macron notably underlined his bias because of his links with the Russian president and more specifically the debt that his party owes – 8 million euros – to a Russian bank. To counter the arguments of her political adversary, Marine Le Pen then pulls out her secret weapon: a tweet printed on an A4 sheet ! This is a statement she made in support of Ukraine in 2014: “I support a free #Ukraine, not subject to the US, #EU or Russia.”
Quickly, this puzzling sequence made the rounds of the web, Twitter precisely, and was hijacked by the most inspired twittos.