2017 French presidential campaign speech from Marine Le Pen shared as recent following EU elections

The claim

On June 16, 2024, a post began circulating online on X (formerly Twitter), claiming to show a video of French National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen giving a victory speech (archived here). The post claimed Le Pen's party won "the most seats in the French EU election" and called particular attention to the language of Le Pen's speech. 

Soon thereafter, similar versions of this post arose, including this one on Facebook, which repeats this language but does not include the video. This text-only post garnered over 1,000 likes on Facebook and suggested that the speech had been made recently, like the original. The post claims that these are policies Le Pen's party would enact if they win the upcoming French legislative election on June 30. This added to the impression that this speech refers to the party's plans for the future rather than a past presidential campaign from seven years ago.

By June 18, 2024, the post on X had gone viral on the platform. One iteration of this post had gained 1.2 million views, 26,000 likes, and 6,400 reshares, and the Facebook post had gained 7,200 plays. Another post had 1.1 million views, with 5,900 reshares. 

Le Pen's party, National Rally, received the most seats (compared to other French parties) in the 2024 EU Parliament elections. In response, standing French President Emmanuel Macron called for a snap election in French Parliament. Macron's decision shocked many worldwide. 

In fact

The video's upper left corner features the tag "marine2017.fr," which immediately suggests the footage might be outdated. However, people in the comments did not appear to notice this date, and they seemed to believe it was a recent video that followed the party's EU election success. 

Marine Le Pen ran for French president in 2017, so we searched through Le Pen's 2017 campaign speeches and rallies. 

Comparison of Le Pen's 2017 campaign speech (left) with her June 2024 speech (right) after her party won EU Parliament Seats.
(Source: Facebook/YouTube/France24/Screenshots)

We took a still of the video, noticing Le Pen's shirt, and using a reverse image search, we located Le Pen's speech at an April 2017 rally in Nice, France. Comparing the audio of both revealed that the video on Facebook was indeed a seven-year-old clip from this speech. The 2017 speech was from a rally or campaign speech, not a victory speech. Le Pen did not go on to win the 2017 election. 

The Facebook text post additionally made the following claim: "In a bold statement that's shaking the political landscape, Marine Le Pen has declared that if her party wins the upcoming French election, there will be mass deportations of foreigners who 'collaborate with a totalitarian ideology that wants the death of the French."

The phrase in quotation marks is a direct quotation from Marine Le Pen's 2017 speech, which is included in the abovementioned video. As such, it does not accurately represent the RN's policies in the upcoming legislative elections.

Marine Le Pen is no longer the leader of the National Rally party - this position is now filled by Jordan Bardella. The party has not announced plans to deport all foreigners as part of their current election campaign - although Bardella did note in 2022 that they had plans to initiate stricter deportation policies for immigrants convicted of crimes.

The verdict

This video is from a 2017 presidential campaign rally Le Pen held in Nice, France, and is not a speech following the recent EU elections. Candidates for France's 2027 presidential elections have not yet been announced. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that quotations from the 2017 speech by Marine Le Pen were also circulating in text post form online, without being accompanied by the misleading video which we originally checked.