Twitter codes beat black-out
Nicknames take over the internet as users bid to leak election results, saying "Flan costs more than Rolex"
ATTEMPTS to impose a black-out on the leaking of the first-round election results led to a blizzard of coded messages as internet users found ways round the ban.
Some used Second World War code to refer to the candidates while others used references to the weather or common prices.
Others used Pays-Bas for Hollande, Hongrie for Sarkozy, and Stalingrad for Jean -Luc Mélenchon and Daddy's girl for Marine Le Pen.
On Twitter, users marked their tweets with the tag #RadioLondres in reference to the Free French codes used in the Second World War.
Among the best were:
"Tomorrow it will be 29C at Tulle (the village where François Hollande is mayor) and 27C at Neuilly (where Nicolas Sarkozy was mayor)"
"The high heels (a reference to Sarkozy's height) have been packed away"
"In France we continue to overtake on the left"
"Flan (a nickname for Hollande from before he went on a diet) costs more than a Rolex (referring to Sarkozy's bling-bling lifestyle)"
"The goulash (referring to Sarkozy's Hungarian parentage) has been vomited"
"Fouquet's (the restaurant where Sarkozy celebrated his 2007 victory) is closed"
"Netherlands-Hungary qualify for return leg"
The election also sparked massive interest in foreign news websites which had said they would not be restricted by the law banning disclosure of results before the last polling station closed at 20.00.
Belgian newspaper Le Soir was badly affected as its website was overloaded and only one in two visitors could get it to load.
Radio Télévision Belge Francophone saw 80 times the usual number of visitors to its chatroom, pulling in 180,000.
