PARIS �� The French presidential election will he held Sunday after a last-minute twist saw front-runner Emmanuel Macron's campaign fall victim to a hacking attack.
Minutes before a legally mandated blackout on campaigning ended at midnight Friday, Macron's campaign said in a statement that it was the victim of a cyberattack in which hackers published a mix of fake documents and real papers stolen from staff's personal and professional email accounts.
The country's electoral control commission requested media to refrain from disseminating details of the leaked material. News of the hacking complaint was reported by print media, including Le Monde newspaper and Agence France-Presse, but broadcasters remained largely silent on the matter Saturday.
After a campaign marked by scandal, virulence and terrorism, voters will choose between centrist pro-European Union Macron and his far-right anti-EU rival, Marine Le Pen. Rallies, interviews and opinion polls were banned after midnight Friday to give voters time to think about their choice.
Macron and Le Pen outpolled the Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans in the first round of the presidential election April 23, defeating establishment parties that had governed France since Charles de Gaulle led the Fifth Republic in 1958. Whoever wins, the first round of voting revealed a nation deeply divided, with about 45 percent of votes being cast for candidates wanting to remake the nation's ties with the EU, risking financial chaos.
Macron was well ahead in the polls at the end of Friday. If he wins, French voters will have broken with populist momentum that put Britain on track to leave the European Union and carried Donald Trump to U.S. presidency.
Yet Le Pen posted her party's biggest-ever vote in the first ballot, highlighting dissatisfaction by conquering the depressed towns of industrial decline in the north and east, and the conservative heartlands of the south. France's unemployment rate remains stuck at 10 percent, roughly double the levels in Britain and Germany.
Voter anger, however, was not what dominated the final hours before campaigning stopped. As Macron's team said Friday that fake information had been mixed into a trove, Le Pen aide Florian Philippot suggested that the media had avoided scrutinizing Macron thoroughly.
"Will the #Macronleaks uncover things that investigative journalism has deliberately killed?" Philippot said in a Twitter post just before the blackout began. "Frightening democratic shipwreck."
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(Helene Fouquet and Gregory Viscusi contributed to this report.)
