Municipal council elections France: 15 and 22 March 2026
The Justice for Prosperity Foundation (JfP) investigated foreign manipulation and disinformation targeting eight European elections between September 2025 and April 2026. In our report, we mapped the operations, domestic amplifiers and their effect for each country. This page focuses entirely on France.
France is, alongside Ukraine, one of the best-documented targets of foreign information manipulation in Europe. The European External Action Service EEAS counted 152 documented campaigns targeting France. For the first time in history, the French government publishes weekly bulletins on ongoing influence attempts.
In early February 2026, a Storm-1516-style campaign was launched, like the one in Germany. A copied France ‑ Soir‑ site (a news platform), forged emails , fabricated newspaper front pages, and a video report on X falsely linked Macron to the Jeffrey Epstein affair . According to French government agencies , the campaign is most likely attributable to Storm ‑ 1516 .
On March 6, 2026, the French government agency for protection against foreign digital interference, Viginum, attributed a digital attack on Pierre-Yves Bournazel, a candidate in the Paris municipal elections, to Storm-1516. In this video, it was claimed that Bournazel wanted to convert the Centre Pompidou into a migrant reception centre. A narrative that seems familiar to us by now. A fake website (identical to the campaign website) was deployed to further spread the false promise. VIGINUM counted fewer than 20,000 views, well below the usual reach of Storm-1516 operations (approximately 100,000 views), which can reach up to 4 million views per campaign. It was the first documented Storm-1516 attack on a candidate in French municipal elections.
A few days later, the French government agency VIGINUM (part of the SGDSN, Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security) revealed the second FIMI campaign, targeting LFI candidates Sébastien Delogu in Marseille and François Piquemal in Toulouse. VIGINUM detected a network of websites and accounts with foreign metadata, AI-generated photos and simultaneously created domains and profiles.
FIMI operations per country
Click below for more information on election interference in other countries.
About Justice for Prosperity
Justice for Prosperity (JfP) is an independent research and detection platform based in Amsterdam that exposes and helps counter societal manipulation and subversive threats. We investigate how actors organise themselves online and offline, what networks, narratives, amplifiers and revenue models drive them, and how they put democratic processes and institutions, social cohesion and fundamental rights under pressure.
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