France, which will hold its presidential elections in eight months, is a priority target of Vladimir Putin’s destabilizing campaign against the European Union. In case there was still any doubt, three candidates for the Élysée – former prime ministers Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, as well as MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, an ally of the socialists – have recently been victims of disinformation operations attributed to networks linked to the Kremlin, with fake news of defamatory intent.
The purpose of the Russian interference, part of the hybrid war that Moscow has been waging for years, seems quite clear: to weaken those who could face Marine Le Pen in the second round of the elections. That a country with the weight of France would fall into the hands of the far right would, a priori, be a great victory in Putin’s strategy because it would place at the head of one of the EU’s founders, and the only one with its own nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a political force traditionally very Eurosceptic and nationalist. The Franco-German tandem and cohesion among the Twenty-Seven would suffer.
The lie about Philippe, who is mayor of the Norman port city of Le Havre and led the government for the first three years of Macron’s presidency, consisted of claiming that he suffered from “frontotemporal dementia.” About Attal, who is 37 years old, the rumor was spread that he showed signs of Parkinson’s disease and that he was addicted to drugs, like his father, who died of a fulminant cancer a few years ago.
With Raphaël Glucksmann, who has been relentless with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, the manipulation was even more sophisticated, using methods of reality falsification, identity theft, and deep fake. The Russian network Storm1516 devised an alleged attempt to corrupt media to encourage his candidacy. At the head of this maneuver would have been Glucksmann’s wife, Léa Salamé, a television presenter. Even the voice of a well-known investigative journalist, Edwy Plenel, was falsified, to whom money would have been offered.
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The work of the Russian factory of lies is no surprise. Macron has been publicly denouncing disinformation for years, once directly to Putin himself. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu recently confirmed the serious danger France faces in the 2027 presidential elections and met with the parties. The Interior Minister, Laurent Núñez, presented to Parliament a bill to toughen sanctions against those who try to manipulate the electoral campaign with false information.
French security and counterintelligence services are alert to detect and expose cases of interference, something that is deterrent and educates the audience. The recent incidents were revealed by the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security (SGDSN) and a special surveillance service against external digital interference (Viginum), which already worked thoroughly during the last municipal elections, considered a dress rehearsal. There is no doubt that the operations against the candidates came from networks of Russian origin and “organs linked to the Russian central power.”
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The Russian modus operandi for these interferences is called “Matrioschka” (like the typical Russian dolls) and consists of fake reports, videos from broadcasters, and covers of supposedly real newspapers, tampering with the original French media.
Mélenchon denounces that his party, of the radical left, was a victim of Israeli interference
The candidate of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, condemned the attacks on his rivals, although he recalled that his party also suffered similar interference in the last municipal elections – against its candidates in Marseille, Toulouse, and Marseille – attributed to a private Israeli entity, BlackCore.
The Russians have not limited themselves in recent years to illicitly meddling in French electoral campaigns. The Kremlin is considered responsible for purely destabilizing actions and sowing discord in French society carried out by unprofessional agents from Eastern Europe who in some cases were arrested. Among them was placing empty coffins in front of the Eiffel Tower to warn of the blood cost of sending French soldiers to Ukraine, graffiti of Stars of David in Paris – due to the scandal always caused by anti-Semitism – or pig heads placed in front of mosques in the capital, to irritate the Muslim population.
The green candidate proposes banning the X network during the campaign
The threats of interference do not only come from Russia. In an interview with the newspaper Libération, the presidential candidate of the ecologists, Marine Tondelier, proposed banning the X network, at least temporarily, during the electoral campaign, due to the impact of the algorithms used, which systematically favor far-right messages. “Threatening platforms like X with a ban seems necessary to me, and this sanction should be applied in case of verified interference,” said Tondelier. “If X were stopped for a month, it would do a lot of good to the French public debate.”
For the green candidate, neither freedom of expression nor freedom of enterprise is at stake, but taking measures against “a tool that is owned by one person (Elon Musk), based in the United States, with a supremacist ideology that wants to precipitate Europe into total submission to the United States.” Tondelier recalled that Musk has expressed his support for Le Pen, whom she reproached because her party always boasts of patriotism and is, therefore, “a hypocrisy” that “all foreign powers hostile to France have an interest in her victory.”
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