En Marche! Puffery Ahead of June Legislative Elections

UPDATE II: Reuters says "Macron's party seen comfortably winning French parliamentary vote," based on the latest Harris/LCP poll. If you go to the Wikipedia page for the 2017 French legislative elections, En Marche! does appear to be running away with it. So I'll have to amend yesterday's skepticism with the thought that the French much be truly desperate/delusional to think that a Rothschild banker promising market-friendly fixes offers a path forward.

UPDATE:The Associated Press is reporting this morning, Thursday, June 1, in "The Latest: France says no trace of Russian hacking Macron," that 

The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack “was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”

He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.

Poupard is director general of the government cyber-defense agency known in France by its acronym, ANSSI. Its experts were immediately dispatched when documents stolen from the Macron campaign leaked online on May 5 in the closing hours of the presidential race.

Poupard says the attack’s simplicity “means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country.”

Of course this was mentioned at the time of the alleged hack, but far down in the body of most accounts. Overwhelming the reporting accepted that Russia was up to its dirty tricks again. It just goes to show how you overtly "fake" the mainstream medium tilts these days.

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To sample the blatant, over-the-top puffing of Emmanuel Macron check out Vox's "French President Emmanuel Macron just went after Russia — to Putin’s face":

“Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik,” [Macron] continued, “were organs of influence during this campaign which, on several occasions, told lies about myself and my campaign. ... Russia Today and Sputnik did not behave as media organizations and journalists, but as agencies of influence and propaganda, lying propaganda — no more, no less.”

Then he went further. He said France was prepared to use military force if Syria used chemical weapons again. Echoing similar language from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Macron said he would be paying close attention to a recent wave of horrific violence against gay men in Chechnya.

Because of these comments, with Putin standing nearby, Macron is being hailed as a courageous leader. Talk about "propaganda, lying propaganda."

An all-hands-on-deck public-diplomacy project is underway to provide Macron a working majority for his infant En Marche! party in France's legislative elections in June. The Financial Times published a story, "Strong debut boosts Macron’s prospects in French national polls," the other day predicting that

Now polls suggest his cross-party movement, La République En Marche, will attract about 30 per cent of the vote in the first round of the election on June 11 — a 10-point gain in a month and putting the party within reach of winning an absolute majority in the run-off round on June 18.

FT then provides the following graphic:

Nowhere are the polls cited that form the basis for this tumescent projection. The CIA probably hasn't been this involved in a European election since Italy in 1948.