Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

By Seyedmojtaba Hashemighalati

20.05.2017 – Paris

Marine le Pen won the second round of the French presidential election on Saturday, in a shock result that sent political tremors across Europe.

The far-right leader of the National Front party took an emphatic 59% of the votes, significantly ahead of 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, whose independent En Marche party was only set up a year ago.

Jean-Luc Richard, Front National campaign manager, said in an interview: “Marine Le Pen cares for France first.” He added: “The French people understood … our plan to stop refugees from coming to our country. We have a lot of immigrants making trouble.”

He said that one of the first items on the agenda of Le Pen would be a trip to the US to discuss Mideast migration with US President Donald Trump.

“We will make France clean from terrorism, France for the French,” he stated.

In the 12^th Arrondissement of Paris,” which overwhelmingly voted for Macron, despair was written on the faces of his supporters.

“After living all these years in Paris, now that this woman has won, I am going to have to pack my bags, take my family, and move to Brussels,” said Sophie Geroux, a 27-year-old accountant.

*This fictitious article was created as part of a journalism workshop conducted under the Jean Monnet OLIVE teaching programme, for refugees, at the University of Vienna; It is not intended to represent actual facts. Some names that appear in the article are invented; so is the dateline.