(ALBI, France) — Fake news and alleged hacking attempts dominated France's tense presidential campaign Thursday with just two days left for independent Emmanuel Macron and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen to win over voters before Sunday's high-stakes runoff. The duel ahead of Sunday´s election was billed as a confrontation between Macron´s call for openness and pro-market reforms and Le Pen´s France-first nationalism. Le Pen called the euro, shared by 19 countries in the European Union and blamed by some in France for a rise in prices, as “the currency of bankers, it’s not the people’s currency.”

Like much of the French press, Le Monde said the debate had been “brutal” and “violent from start to finish.”

Former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said Le Pen “showed her true face” in the debate and “it’s worrying.”

Trailing in the polls, the debate was probably Le Pen’s last chance to change the dynamics of the race ahead of the final weekend of a long and unpredictable campaign. When her father Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the final round of the presidential election in 2002, his conservative opponent Jacques Chirac refused to debate with him out of fear of “normalizing hate and intolerance”. Macron quit Hollande’s government last August to concentrate on his new centrist political movement En Marche, which has drawn 250,000 members in 12 months.
Candidates Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron face off in a debate.