It was meant to be one of those lazy, news-starved stretches of summer—a time when political life in France slows to a crawl and the big stories are about tourists and weather. But on 11 August 2026, at just past half past three in the afternoon, that illusion was shattered. Within ten days, three likely or declared candidates for France’s 2027 presidential election had been publicly identified as targets of foreign digital interference operations. First came Raphaël Glucksmann, the centre-left MEP, who revealed that a fake online “investigation” from the pro-Russian network Storm-1516—a group linked to Russian military intelligence—claimed his partner, the prominent journalist Léa Salamé, was scheming to get favourable media coverage for his campaign. The fabrication was supported by invented quotes attributed to established journalists like Edwy Plenel, and it was serious enough for Paris prosecutors to open a criminal investigation. Then Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister and now general secretary of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, announced he had filed a legal complaint over “foreign interference” from Russian networks, specifically a pro-Kremlin operation known as Matryoshka. The false accusations against Attal included wild claims about his health, his father, and even that he was waging a “war against women.” Finally, Édouard Philippe, another former prime minister and the elected mayor of Le Havre, was targeted by Storm-1516 with disinformation about his medical condition. His team quickly set up a “response cell” to monitor online attacks. What made the episode even more striking was the timing: three ambitious politicians, all facing the same enemy, all within days, in what should have been a quiet month.
To understand what this means, you need a guide through the murky world of digital destabilisation—someone like Rayna Stamboliyska, a cyber-threat expert and author of La Face cachée d’Internet, who specializes in what she calls “information disorder.” Her immediate reaction to these events is a simple but crucial one: caution. It is tempting, she says, to join the dots and declare that France’s 2027 presidential campaign is already under attack by a coordinated Russian campaign. But the reality is more complicated. For every successful operation, there are hundreds of digital attacks that fail, fizzle out, or simply disappear into the noise. Stamboliyska points to the so-called “Red Hands” operation as a rare textbook case: an attack that included an assault on the Holocaust memorial in Paris, carried out by Russian proxies, and that could be traced in real time, linked to elections, and followed by legal consequences. That kind of clarity is the exception, not the rule. In most cases, the connection between a covert operation and its impact is impossible to prove with certainty. Worse, these operations do not stop outside election periods. They are a constant background hum. Yet because they are often technically amateurish—a hastily built website, a ChatGPT-written article stuffed with keywords, a fake screenshot that falls apart under minimal scrutiny—they rarely make a lasting impression unless they are amplified by the media. It is a bit like dropping pebbles into a lake: most are never noticed, but every now and then someone mistakes a ripple for a wave.
What changed in the past ten days, according to Stamboliyska, is not the existence of the operations but the way they were brought into the light. In previous cases, like the operation targeting far-left candidates before the municipal elections, it was journalists or state institutions that revealed what had happened. This time, the candidates themselves went public. That may sound like a natural reaction, but it marks a significant shift. When a politician announces that he or she has been targeted by “the big bad Kremlin,” the news carries an official seal of seriousness because state services have already detected and confirmed the operation. Being attacked becomes a kind of political badge, a sign that you are important enough to worry your enemies. Stamboliyska is careful not to suggest bad faith on the part of Glucksmann, Attal, or Philippe, but she insists that the dynamic is dangerous. There is a boy-who-cried-wolf problem: if every candidate publicly claims to be the victim of Russian interference, then the public may become numb to the threat, and the very real danger of foreign meddling may be dismissed as campaign theatre. Even more importantly, the publicity creates an amplification effect that the original attackers could never have bought with their own resources. A deepfake seen by only five thousand people, boosted by a few thousand bots, suddenly becomes the lead story on national news. In the middle of summer, when other political news is scarce, the story is picked up again and again. The return on investment for the malicious actors is colossal: they spent almost nothing, produced something cheap and crude, and got the entire French media to do the rest of the work for them.
This is the uncomfortable economics of disinformation, and it forces us to confront a deeply human weakness: the desire for a simple story. The idea that a hidden enemy is steering our democracy is both terrifying and strangely reassuring—it explains chaos, gives meaning to random events, and offers a clear villain. But Stamboliyska warns that we must distinguish between perception and intent. What do the people behind a possible interference operation actually want to achieve? And is that the same thing as the effect we perceive? Perhaps the creators of a fake video about Léa Salamé really do want to stop Raphaël Glucksmann from becoming the sole candidate of the left. Perhaps they do not. The truth is that nobody knows. The Russian side operates through a sprawling, often chaotic network of outsourced content producers. You might literally have young people paid a pittance to spend their days producing propaganda. The same person who makes a fake TikTok video of a French politician might also produce a video of cats. To them, it is all part of the same unremarkable routine. This does not mean the attacks are harmless, but it does mean we should be careful before assigning them a grand, strategic purpose. The danger of seeing conspiracies everywhere is that we become blind to the places where the threat is real. And the danger of responding too loudly is that we play directly into the hands of people whose only goal might be to make noise.
That is why the distinction between “influence” and “interference” matters so much. Influence is open, public, and sometimes entirely legal: it is what pro-Kremlin propagandists like Xenia Fedorova do when they appear on television, give interviews, and try to shape opinions under their own names. France has already moved to expel her from the country. Interference, on the other hand, is covert: it involves hidden operations designed to manipulate public debate in a foreign country without revealing their origin. The problem is that when politicians themselves declare that they have been targeted, the distinction can blur. Stamboliyska insists that attribution—the process of identifying the foreign actor behind an operation and its probable purpose—is a technical task that should be left to specialist institutions like VIGINUM, the French state agency created precisely to counter foreign digital interference. That is not just a bureaucratic preference; it is a safeguard. If attribution becomes part of a candidate’s campaign narrative, then it ceases to be an objective tool and becomes a weapon in the political battle itself. The politician is not simply reporting a fact; he or she is sending a message to voters, allies, and rivals: I am the one they fear. That may be true, but it is also a calculated way of using foreign interference for domestic political advantage. And once that starts, it becomes harder for the public to know whether an alert is a genuine security warning or a move in the game. We are still far from being able to prove a causal link between these operations and the corrosion of public debate, but we are very good at making them part of the story we want to tell about ourselves.
So what should we take away from this strange August week? First, the threat is real. Foreign interference operations exist, they are active, and they will almost certainly intensify as the 2027 presidential election approaches. The fact that three candidates were targeted in such a short time is not a coincidence. It is a warning that the campaign will be fought not only on the ground and on television but also in the murky world of fake websites, deepfakes, and manipulated narratives. But it is also a warning that our reaction to these attacks is part of the battle. We cannot afford to panic, to exaggerate, or to romanticize the attackers as all-powerful villains. They are often lazy, cheap, and opportunistic, but that does not make them harmless. The best response, Stamboliyska suggests, is a subtle combination of transparency and restraint: tell people what is happening, teach them how to recognize manipulation, but do not turn every petty operation into a national crisis. The public needs to become more discerning, not more frightened. And the candidates themselves need to remember that the loudest defence of democracy is not always the most effective one. In the end, the resilience of French democracy will not be measured by how many operations are exposed, but by how little they manage to change our minds. The attackers want us to lose trust in each other, in institutions, in the very idea of truth. The strongest answer is not to shout louder, but to think more clearly.