Radio Londres: Follow the French election with satirical Twitter page

For anyone eager to follow the results of the first round of this year's presidential election in France tomorrow (April 10), one humourous option is the Twitter page Radio Londres.

The page has, since the 2012 presidential election, been using early leaks to post humorous insights into the election count, using comedy to imply which candidates are doing well or poorly.

In France, media are forbidden from sharing early election counts before all voting stations are closed, meaning before 20:00.

It means that you will not get predictions from French media before this time.

But Radio Londres has found a cheeky way to get around this rule, using humorous codes to suggest results based on early leaks.

The name is based on Radio Londres, a French-language radio station broadcast from 1940 to 1944 by the BBC in London to Nazi-occupied France.

The broadcast usually included obscure coded phrases that were seemingly nonsense, such as “Jean has a long moustache”, that carried secret messages to allied agents in the field.

Read more: Radio Londres kept us going in the war

The modern Twitter page with the same name also uses coded messages.

During the last presidential election in 2017, it often hinted at people “buying a lot of macaroons”, a popular French cake that sounds similar to a certain presidential candidate (Emmanuel Macron, just in case).

During the second round of voting, when Mr Macron faced off against Marine Le Pen, it used another not-so-subtle code to suggest the election results, riffing on the songs ‘Macarena’ by Los Del Río and ‘Le Pénitencier’ by Johnny Hallyday.

The Twitter page is gearing up to cover the first round of this year’s election, with voting taking place tomorrow (April 10).

You can follow along via the Twitter page at this link.

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