An image and video clip shows Marine Le Pen crying after her party, the National Rally, came third in the French National Assembly elections.
This isn’t correct. Ms Le Pen was filmed crying with laughter while taking part in a radio show in 2017.
False claims that Marine Le Pen, leader of the French political party National Rally, was filmed crying at the result of the recent France National Assembly elections have been shared widely online.
The posts on Facebook use either a screenshot or in some cases a video clip of Ms Le Pen, who appears to be in a radio studio and wiping away tears.
But these claims are not what they seem. The clips actually show Ms Le Pen crying with laughter during a radio appearance seven years ago.
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Members of the National Assembly—the lower house of the French Parliament—are elected through a two-round system where voters choose their preferred candidate in two polling days, usually a week apart.
Assuming no candidate wins 50% of the first round of votes, the top two go to the second round, as well as all those with support from at least 12.5% of registered voters.
Ms Le Pen’s party was expected to top the second round of voting earlier this month after getting the most votes in the first round.
However, a coalition of other parties, the New Popular Front, won the most seats, with the National Rally moving into third place, behind President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble alliance.
Ms Le Pen spoke after the result, saying they were “losing one more year” which was “sad”. However, the footage of her “crying” comes from an appearance on journalist Thomas Sotto’s radio show on the French station Europe 1 in 2017, alongside a French impressionist comedian Nicolas Canteloup.
The screenshot is a frame from a YouTube video of that interview, which is titled [translated by Google]: “When Marine Le Pen cried with laughter at Nicolas Canteloup's imitations.”
From 11:43 she can be seen smiling and laughing in the full video—wiping away tears of laughter rather than sadness.
It's important to consider whether what you see is accurate before sharing it online, as misleading posts such as these can undermine trust in election results and democratic processes.
This is not the first online misinformation we’ve seen about Ms Le Pen’s party. We recently fact checked a miscaptioned election results map which claimed to show a huge victory for National Rally, and previously explained that a clip of French TV showed a technical glitch rather than electoral fraud.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image and video is from an interview in 2017 where Marine Le Pen cried with laughter at an impressionist, not in response to the 2024 French election result.
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