Barrot warns of foreign interference in the presidential election

Paris – August 7, 2026: France will not tolerate any foreign interference in the run-up to the presidential election, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot has declared. His statement followed criticism from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had accused the government of lacking determination on Thursday evening. The trigger was several coordinated disinformation campaigns targeting politicians considered potential contenders for the Élysée Palace.

In recent days, Gabriel Attal, Édouard Philippe and Raphaël Glucksmann have been affected. Fake posts about Attal circulated on platform X under imitated media logos, claiming that he had Parkinson’s disease. According to sources close to him, the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security, SGDSN, had pointed to interference from Russia and the Russian state apparatus.

The state service Viginum attributed the operation targeting Attal to the pro-Russian Matrioshka network with a high degree of certainty. Philippe was targeted at the end of July with claims concerning his health. In Glucksmann’s case, user accounts spread the unsubstantiated claim that his partner Léa Salamé had bribed media outlets for more favorable coverage. This campaign was attributed to the Storm-1516 network, which is linked to Russian intelligence structures.

The reach of the individual content items remained limited according to the findings known so far, with each receiving only a few thousand views. Politically, however, the incidents carry more weight than their immediate visibility suggests. The attacks targeted representatives of the political center and center-left across party lines. Mélenchon condemned the manipulation attempts and called for a united front of all candidates against such operations.

Since 2021, France has had Viginum, a specialized service for detecting and assessing foreign digital influence operations. A report published in June had already classified a campaign surrounding the March 2026 municipal elections as foreign digital interference. The investigation identified technical indications of actors from Israel; at the same time, Viginum stressed the campaign’s limited visibility online.

On July 22, 2026, the government also created by decree an independent commission tasked with informing the public in cases of proven foreign interference in elections. It can receive reports from the responsible authorities, warn parties and candidates, publicize threats and refer matters to the justice system. However, it will only become active after the official calling of voters and no earlier than six months before the first round of voting.

Barrot’s pledge is therefore, for now, a political signal. French authorities can now identify and technically attribute patterns of manipulation at an early stage. However, the latest cases show that an institutional gap remains between this analytical capability and the formal intervention of the new commission.