It has emerged that the leader of France's hard-right Front National party (FN) may have been using a fake Twitter account to discretely convey her party's message, reports Yahoo! News.
Out of the five voting-intention surveys conducted this year (2015) ahead of the 2017 French presidential elections, three have put Marine Le Pen ahead of the polls. Le Monde claimed on Friday (04 September) that Le Pen has been using the pseudonym Anne Lalanne to tweet to her followers.
The 'fake' account has apparently been used to send 800 tweets to just as many followers. While Le Pen, the daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has rejected the allegations, sources close to the party leader told Le Monde that she was indeed behind the Twitter account.
The FN's number one already has an account in her name, @MLP_officiel, with around 681,000 followers. But according to the French daily, the page that transcribes Le Pen's media appearances and speeches is actually manned by close colleagues – not the leader herself.
According to the sources, however, the FN founder's daughter is the one behind the Anne Lalanne account. "She looks at Twitter a lot," a source said. "Especially in the car."
Anne is Le Pen's second name, and Lalanne is her mother Pierrette's maiden name. According to Le Monde, the 'fake' Twitter handle @enimar68 is an anagram of 'Marine', with the '68' relating to her birth year of 1968.
Further proof of her involvement, according to the French daily, is the fact that the first Twitter accounts that Anne followed are those of Le Pen's partner Aliot, Le Pen's confident, and a party financial backer Frédéric Chatillon, as well as Le Pen's publisher, Philippe Grancher, who has published two of her books.
Read more of this report from the International Business Times published by Yahoo! News.