Swedish pop starlet's president plea 'a hoax'

A pop video featuring a blonde Swedish singer imploring left-wing French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon to "take power over me" has been revealed to be a media hoax.

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"You are a musician who plays music on me," sings 24-year-old "Victoire Passage" in the video that has been seen over 500,000 times on YouTube and sparked a quest to find out her identity.

The video shows the singer dancing or taking a bath with men wearing a mask of Melenchon's likeness, or just relaxing in romantic poses along picturesque sections of Paris's Seine river.

French media seized on the video for a little excitement during what many consider to be a dull campaign ahead of the April 22nd-May 6th presidential election, in which Melenchon is predicted to win around 16 percent of votes.

A press release said Passage "fell in love" with Melenchon after watching a television reportage about the Communist-backed candidate when he called to
"retake the Bastille" at a rally in March.

On Friday, the conservative and widely-read Le Figaro newspaper published a story revealing the singer's identity as Rebecca Carlborn, a Swedish singer who "wants to be like Paris Hilton."

But public relations company Passage Pietons told AFP that the video was in fact just to celebrate the company's seventh birthday.

"The campaign was sad, boring, we wanted to bring in something fresh," Frederic Lambert, one of Passage Pietons' two bosses, told AFP, explaining that the video was cooked up and created over a week.

"What's surprising is that a serious newspaper like Le Figaro, which said it did an investigation, wrote a lot of inaccuracies. The journalist called and said 'I know who you are'," Lambert said.

The woman who answered the phone and gave the interview had written the song's lyrics and so pretended to be the Swedish model-singer in an unusually evasive interview, he added.