The race for the Élysée has begun with a clash over Russian interference

In the sweltering French summer, only Gabriel Attal, former Prime Minister and young Macron supporter, remains campaigning for the 2027 presidential election – and with a certain amount of enthusiasm at that. The polls show him trailing behind the other candidate, who aims to rally the centrist camp behind him and wrest the moderate right-wing vote away from Marine Le Pen – namely Edouard Philippe, mayor of Le Havre and leader of Horizons. In recent weeks, both have been the target of increasingly frequent operations: disinformation campaigns carried out by Russian networks. Raphaël Glucksmann, a reassuring and moderate figure on the French left (not yet an official candidate: he is expected to announce his bid for the Élysée by the end of the summer), has also been the victim of a similar operation. In all three cases, posts, videos and front pages circulated on social media that mimicked the appearance of official news outlets and contained false information: ranging from alleged health problems affecting Philippe to an attempt by Glucksmann’s partner, the journalist Léa Salamé, to bribe her colleagues to ensure favourable media coverage of his candidacy; in Attal’s case, some content suggested that he himself had orchestrated the campaign. Macron’s former prime minister said he expected further attacks and had stopped using Telegram. Viginum, the French agency for surveillance and protection against foreign digital interference, which operates under the authority of the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN), has traced this latest operation to the pro-Russian network Matryoshka, known for its mass disinformation campaigns aimed at creating media chaos and undermining the work of fact-checkers, whilst the first two can be traced back to the Storm-1516 group, affiliated with the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.

This is nothing new: since the MacronLeaks case in 2017, there has not been a single election in France without attempts by foreign agents – particularly Russian ones – to manipulate information. According to the third report by the European External Action Service on foreign information interference, in 2024 – the year of the snap parliamentary elections and the Paris Olympics – France was the European country, after Ukraine, most affected by Russian-origin disinformation operations. But next year’s presidential election – in which Marine Le Pen is firmly in the lead – represents a crucial moment. The major dress rehearsal took place this spring, when votes were cast in more than 35,000 French municipalities. Viginum recently produced a report specifically on the municipal elections, identifying and categorising various instances of foreign digital interference: these include Storm-1516, which has been linked to 205 disinformation operations since 2023. According to a NewsGuard investigation published to mark the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Storm-1516 itself has targeted Germany and France, continuously publishing false information against the two countries: since January 2025 alone – when US support for Kyiv began to wane and Europe became the main target of Russian propaganda – 175,000 articles of this kind have been published, generating 274 million views on X alone. The Viginum report also mentions Matriochka, which, operating with the Storm-1679 group, is said to have launched, between January and March 2026, seven separate disinformation operations linked to the local elections, all aimed at conveying the message that the elections would not take place under safe conditions. The impact of these operations on the vote was fairly limited, partly due to the prompt action taken by the Réseau de coordination et de protection des élections (Rcpe), the mechanism for identifying and reporting threats – France is currently one of the European countries best prepared to respond to disinformation campaigns. However, as the report states, the “persistent determination” of foreign actors to influence electoral processes should not be underestimated, and foreign digital threats are expected to intensify ahead of the 2027 presidential elections.

The excessive attention that political leaders give to individual operations, wrote Damien Leloup in an analysis in "Le Monde", “plays into the hands of Russian organisations. Nothing pleases these small groups more than seeing a French presidential candidate speak publicly about their activities”, and raising too many alarms risks spreading the idea amongst the public that the information is unreliable and that public debate is constantly distorted – which is precisely the Kremlin’s objective. But the election campaign has begun and the attacks targeting Philippe, Glucksmann and Attal have already become a point of contention: in an interview with BFM TV, Attal stated in no uncertain terms that this interference has always been aimed at supporting the Rassemblement National. Le Pen has not commented on the incidents, nor has she responded to the accusation, but some of her supporters have: Sébastien Chenu, national vice-president of the RN, wrote on X that the party opposes “all foreign interference” (not just Russian interference, ed.). This view was shared by MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy, who said that “Russian interference in France is being countered and has no influence whatsoever”, and that no one has ever condemned foreign influence in favour of Macron’s supporters, “such as that of Obama”.