The far-right candidate in the French presidential election, Marine Le Pen, is under scrutiny for plagiarism after she gave a speech which took language and phrases from a rival candidate. In the video below, which was posted on YouTube from the pro-Fillon group Ridicule TV, shows the two speeches cut and overlapping phrases and sentences. As Ridicule TV first noted, ‘Le Pen’ repeated every word of the two passages used by Fillon.
Reddit has now learned about the speech and has started giving their thoughts.
The FN is in damage-control mode, officials say that it was done on purpose, “a wink to a touching extract from a speech about France from a candidate who seeks to unite and is not sectarian”, while their social media activists are spreading false information (including in the Youtube comment section of this video) about the whole thing being a much older text that they’re both quoting when in reality there are only two sentences that are quotes from Clémenceau and Malraux.
-HI_London (reddit)
It’s about getting free media. Nobody would have cared about her speech, let alone covered it. Now everybody talks about it and parts of it are shown on television.
It’s from the Trump playbook of grabbing attention at all costs. (And it worked for him.)
Dear Le Pen, if you’re minimally smart, then plagiarize the speech of someone who wasn’t eliminated soon after pronouncing it…
We ran the speech through our plagiarism detection software and found many online resources discussing the plagiarized passages from the speech.
The text of both speeches is also available online, find it on 1) Fillon’s website and 2) Le Pen’s Facebook account — so the phrasing can be compared in detail for similarities.