Does a video show people waving Algerian flags after the second round of the 2024 French legislative election? No, that's not true: The video is from sometime in 2019. At that time, people gathered in a Parisian square to support a pro-democracy cause in Algeria.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on July 7, 2024. The post featured a video of people waving Algerian flags on and in front of a monument, with a caption that read:
🇫🇷 Le Pen's party just lost the election.
RIP France.The French must really want their country to turn into an Islamic caliphate.
Everyone who voted on the left is a traitor to their country.
Enjoy the chaos, crime, and your replacement if you love it so much.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Jul 9 15:10:09 2024 UTC)
Reverse image searches on Google Lens and TinEye showed the earliest posts of that video predate the election and therefore cannot document any element of celebrations of the election result.
It has been used to illustrate other false claims. Lead Stories previously debunked a claim that the clip showed a 2023 protest in France. In that fact check, we explained that it first was posted to document a 2019 Parisian gathering supporting democracy in Algeria.
As opposed to the first round of the election, which saw a far-right victory, the second round of the election resulted in a left-wing group gaining the most -- but not the majority of -- seats in the French parliament (archived here).
After the second round election, demonstations at the the location shown, Place de la République, did not appear (archived here) to include the same people shown in the post making the claim about Algerian flags held by those celebrating the election result.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to the 2024 French legislative election can be found here and here.
