Le Pen denies calling Fillon a s***

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has denied calling failed mainstream right-winger François Fillon "a shit" in an interview with an Italian journalist.

Graffiti and a picture of Karl Marx deface a Marine Le Pen poster in Paris AFP

Le Pen's party, the National Front (FN) on Friday denied a report in the well-known Italian paper Corriere della Sera that she used the abusive term to describe Fillon, the mainstream right candidate she defeated in the first round of the presidential election.

Journalist Aldo Cazzullo interviewed Le Pen after a public meeting on northern France on Thursday evening and asked her to react to Fillon's references to the "violence" and "intolerance" of her party.

"Marine sighs. She searches for an expression, an argument," the paper reported. "Then she explodes, 'Because they're shits: Excuse me but no other term occurs to me'."

FN officials denied the claim, insisting that Cazullo would retract on his return to Rome.

One of her campaign team, Frédéric Chatillon, told the AFP news agency that Le Pen had said "Fillon called for a vote for Macron because he is in the shit", adding that "the journalist did not speak perfect French".

But Cazzullo was standing by his story on Friday afternoon.

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