Paris prosecutors have launched a formal investigation into a coordinated disinformation campaign aimed at undermining two of the leading candidates in France’s 2027 presidential election—a case that has already sent tremors through the country’s political class and raised disturbing questions about the integrity of the democratic process itself. According to a Politico report published on August 18, the campaign surfaced early in the summer, when political battle lines were beginning to form and voters were starting to imagine a France beyond Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. The targets were Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, two men who, in very different ways, represent the most plausible centrist future for the country. Philippe, the former prime minister who helped steer France through the early years of Macron’s presidency, has long been seen as a steady, moderate figure capable of uniting the center-right; Attal, who later became the youngest prime minister in modern French history, embodies a newer, more restless generation of political energy. Their presumed candidacies were already reshaping the electoral map, drawing voters away from the extremes and making the next election look like a genuine contest of ideas rather than a referendum on fear. That is precisely why the attacks came when they did. The campaign used fabricated news items, designed to look like the work of France’s most respected journalistic institutions, and circulated them across social media with alarming efficiency. The allegations were not about policy, taxes, or foreign affairs; they were about the bodies and minds of the candidates—claims that one had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, and that the other suffered from Parkinson’s disease and used drugs. The choice was a brutal distillation of modern political warfare: attack the person, not the platform, and force the candidate into a defensive crouch from which it is almost impossible to emerge.
To understand the cruelty of the campaign, one must consider the lives and public images of the two men. Édouard Philippe has built his career on a reputation for intellectual sobriety, a kind of calm that suggests he could be trusted to manage the country’s affairs without melodrama. The fabricated video accusing him of a neurodegenerative disease was therefore not just a lie; it was an attack on the very essence of his public persona. It sought to replace an image of steady competence with an image of fragility, to make voters look at him and wonder, even subconsciously, whether he would be able to withstand the physical and mental pressures of the presidency. Gabriel Attal, meanwhile, has cultivated a persona of youth, energy, and agility—he is the kind of politician who speaks at a fast clip and appears to thrive on the relentless pace of public life. The fake claims about Parkinson’s disease and drug use were aimed directly at that image, suggesting that his dynamism was actually a symptom of illness or substance abuse, that the man who seemed everywhere at once was, underneath it all, barely holding himself together. The videos used the logos and branding of well-known French news outlets, giving them an air of authority that made them nearly indistinguishable from genuine broadcasts. In the space of a few seconds, a casual viewer would see the familiar graphic, hear a narrator using the clipped tones of television journalism, and feel a cold spike of recognition: perhaps the rumors were true. It is difficult to overstate how corrosive this is for public life. A politician who has spent years building trust can be damaged in an afternoon, not by evidence or debate, but by a few carefully constructed frames. Gabriel Attal chose to fight back publicly, calling the videos outright fakes and appealing to people’s common sense. Édouard Philippe remained silent, perhaps calculating that attention would only spread the poison. Each response carried risks, and neither was entirely wrong.
The French state, however, has refused to treat the incident as just another round of online rubbish. Prosecutors have opened a formal investigation, which signals a determination to trace the origins of the campaign and hold its organizers accountable. The technical work has fallen largely to Viginum, France’s dedicated agency for detecting and analyzing foreign digital interference. Viginum has reportedly identified two networks—Storm-1516 and Matriochka—as probable sources of the operation. These names may sound like something from a spy novel, but they are recognized components of a larger Russian disinformation apparatus. Storm-1516, for example, has previously been associated with fabricated newsroom personas, staged interviews, and elaborate false narratives aimed at Western audiences; it is not a random actor, but a systematic operation with a clear understanding of how to exploit the algorithms and emotional rhythms of social media. Matriochka, too, is known for layered operations that use multiple false fronts to obscure their true origin, peeling back like the wooden dolls the name invokes to reveal ever deeper levels of deception. That these networks may have chosen France as a target is no accident; France is not only a founding member of the European Union but also a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a nuclear power, and a country whose political choices resonate far beyond its borders. By attacking Philippe and Attal, the operation appears to be attempting to influence the shape of the French election without necessarily endorsing any one dark-horse candidate. The goal is to weaken the moderate pro-European bloc, to force it into defensive battles over lies, and to leave the broader electorate more confused and suspicious than before. The investigation will need to determine whether the videos were produced by state actors or by intermediaries, how they were spread, and whether any French citizens were knowingly involved. But whatever the outcome, the mere fact that such an operation could be launched against leading presidential candidates is a stark reminder that democracy no longer exists in a secure bubble.
The broader strategic context makes the French investigation all the more important. For well over a decade, Russia has pursued a persistent policy of undermining the European Union from within, exploiting existing tensions between member states and giving support to eurosceptic parties and nationalist movements that promise to weaken the union. The attacks on Philippe and Attal are best understood as a next-generation refinement of that approach. Rather than simply boosting fringe extremists, the Kremlin’s operatives have learned to attack the center—to make the centrist, pro-European politicians who currently hold power seem untrustworthy, unhealthy, and detached from the concerns of ordinary people. Andrii Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, has pointed out that this strategy is directly reminiscent of Russia’s earlier efforts to force “federalization” on Ukraine. In that context, federalization was a subtle but calculated demand that would have transformed Ukraine into a loose patchwork of regions, each with its own loyalties and connections to Moscow, making it far easier for Russia to influence and eventually dominate the country as a whole. Kovalenko argues that the Kremlin sees the European Union in a similar light: not as a military enemy to be conquered, but as a political project to be dismantled. If the EU can be broken into squabbling fragments, then individual European nations will become weaker and more vulnerable to Russian pressure, and some may eventually be pulled back into Moscow’s orbit. The campaign against Philippe and Attal fits neatly into that vision. By injecting false stories into French political life, Russia can make the EU look fragile and foolish, eroding the public’s confidence in the entire idea of collective European governance. Kovalenko has further noted that this policy has been actively promoted since 2014–2015, but its conceptual foundations go back even further, to 2009–2010. This is not a spontaneous reaction to current events; it is a long-term investment in the weakening of Europe, and every fake video and fabricated headline is a small contribution to a much larger, darkly ambitious project.
The long timeline is perhaps the most unsettling part of the story. When Kovalenko speaks of planning that dates back to 2009–2010, he is reminding us that foreign interference is not a sudden illness but a chronic condition, one that has been developing for years. Long before the current crisis in Ukraine, before the annexation of Crimea, before the mass disinformation campaigns that accompanied various Western elections, the infrastructure for this kind of warfare was already being built. What happened in France this summer is simply the latest expression of a strategy that has been tested, refined, and deployed across multiple countries. The tactics are always adapted to local conditions: in one country, it may be racial tensions; in another, migration; in another, the health of political leaders. But the underlying goal is always the same—to create enough confusion and distrust that citizens begin to question the credibility of the entire political system. In France, the fake videos about Philippe and Attal were not intended to convince a majority of voters that these specific men were ill. They were intended to create a low level of doubt, a persistent background noise of suspicion that would make every future statement from the candidates seem slightly less believable. That is how disinformation works: it rarely changes a person’s mind in a single dramatic moment, but it slowly erodes the trust that makes democratic life possible. A society that no longer believes its own news media, no longer trusts its politicians, and no longer feels confident in the integrity of its elections is a society that can be destabilized with very little effort. The French public has shown encouraging signs of resilience—many social media users immediately recognized the videos as fake, and mainstream news organizations declined to amplify them—but the sheer scale and sophistication of the operation is a reminder that vigilance must become a permanent habit, not a temporary response to a single scandal.
Ultimately, this is not just a story about two politicians or one election. It is about the way modern information technology has become a battlefield, and about the vulnerability of open societies to dark forces that operate from a distance. The attacks on Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal were an assault on the fundamental premise of democracy: that citizens can gather together, discuss the issues, weigh the evidence, and make an informed choice about who should lead them. If that premise is poisoned, then every election becomes a theater of doubt, and the very idea of collective self-government begins to collapse. And yet, there is something defiant in the way the story has unfolded. The Paris prosecutors did not shrug; they opened an investigation. Viginum did not deny the problem; it exposed the likely culprits. The candidates did not hide away; at least one of them addressed the lie directly, looking into the cameras and telling voters not to believe what they were seeing. These are signs that democratic institutions are beginning to adapt, that states are waking up to the threat of information warfare and building the tools necessary to fight it. But ultimately, the defense of democracy rests with citizens themselves. It rests in the moment when a person scrolling through their feed stops before sharing a shocking video, takes a breath, and asks: who made this, and what do they want me to feel? It rests in the willingness to trust legitimate journalism, to seek out multiple sources, to accept uncomfortable truths rather than comforting fictions. The campaign against Philippe and Attal was designed to make French voters feel that nothing could be trusted, that the political system was rotten, that their choices did not matter. The answer to that cynical strategy is not more cynicism; it is a renewed commitment to truth, however imperfect and unfashionable it may sometimes seem. The Russian networks may be able to produce a thousand fake videos, but they cannot produce a single vote. That power, still, rests with the people.