If you thought that the American election last year was the only one that the Russians would get dragged into-think again. Yesterday French Presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron’s campaign announced that it had been hacked. All this happened before the French government’s ban on campaigning  and “commentary likely to effect an election” took effect with the announcement coming just hours prior the cut off at midnight Friday. This comes weeks after the campaign had complained about repeated attempts to hack their emails, and had blamed Russian hackers for the attempts, during the hotly contested campaign between Macron and Marine LePen-a second generation politician and former leader of the National Front party. According to Japanese firm Trend Micro, the hackers who succeeded in hacking them last night appear to be linked to Russia, though the company stopped short of definitively naming the state as the culprit.

Evidently the Macron campaign had been targeted by hackers since early this year, but had been able to foil those attempts by training their staff to look for phishing behaviors and other tip offs of possible hacking activity. The leak the EnMarche! campaign was hit with on Friday published 9 gigabytes of information on a site that allows anonymous posting called Pastebin by a user identified only as EMLEAKS. The campaign issued a response Friday evening confirming the leak was in fact a hack:

“The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information,”

Many in the country have been postulating about Russia trying to sway the hotly contested election toward the populist candidate LePen, although Putin has denied these allegations. LePen herself has decried these allegations insisting that Russia has no intention of involving itself in the French Presidential election and that the Russians would simply  like to establish “dialogue” with a “variety of politicians”. Putin for his part has praised LePen saying that she is an indication of a “quickly developing spectrum of European political forces” in an article in USA Today last month.

LePen has urged a stronger partnership with the Kremlin in the event of her winning the upcoming election, leading some to postulate the Putin might be looking to help a girl out. In March candidate LePen visited Moscow and met with the leaders of the nation’s parliament, called the Duma, and was treated to a visit to an exhibit devoted to France at the Kremlin and a meeting with Putin. Evidently this is the treatment usually reserved for heads of state, which caught the attention of the media-both international and French.

Of course even WikiLeaks is getting in on the postulation game on Twitter offering their two cents and criticizing the motives of whomever is responsible stating that the leak is “too late to shift the election” and that the “timing is curious”.

I guess we will have to wait and see how that works out and whether or not WikiLeaks is right. Polls close Sunday night, May 7th, at 8 p.m. in France and if Monday morning is anything like November 9th was in America-it could be very interesting. Pass the popcorn, would you?