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France's Paris prosecutors have launched a formal investigation into whether an Israeli company conducted a foreign influence operation targeting candidates from the hard-left La France Insoumise party during recent municipal elections, after three of the party's politicians reported coordinated smear campaigns against them.
The probe centers on allegations by LFI members Sebastien Delogu of Marseille, Francois Piquemal of Toulouse, and David Guiraud of Roubaix that they were subjected to disinformation campaigns involving fabricated accusations, social media manipulation, and fake campaign materials.
Delogu and Piquemal lost their respective mayoral bids, while Guiraud won his race to become mayor of Roubaix. The trio maintain they were targeted because of their public support for the Palestinian cause.
The alleged tactics were striking in their brazenness. Delogu described arriving at his car to find a billboard bearing his name alongside a QR code directing viewers to false rape accusations.
Piquemal, meanwhile, said his campaign was hit with the creation of pages on social networks spreading "the worst rumours," as well as the publication of his social media passwords, leaving his accounts vulnerable to further manipulation.
The case came to a head after Viginum, France's government agency tasked with combating foreign digital interference, reported detecting what it described as a systematic operation of artificial or automated dissemination used to spread manifestly inaccurate or misleading content.
The agency said the campaign, which it attributed to an actor based abroad, was designed to distort citizens' access to information and as such posed a threat to the fundamental interests of the nation.
Viginum had earlier alerted LFI to the interference targeting its candidates, and the party said it was cooperating with investigators.
A source connected to the case told AFP that the campaigns appeared to originate in Israel. France's Liberation and Israel's Haaretz both named companies allegedly responsible, though AFP said it was unable to immediately confirm those reports.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, separately said it had removed a network of accounts and pages for violating its rules against coordinated inauthentic behavior, stating that the activity originated in Israel and primarily targeted France.
Despite the gravity of the allegations, French prosecutors were careful to draw a distinction between a private company acting abroad and state-sponsored interference.
Authorities said they had seen no indications that the Israeli government was involved, noting that foreign interference, in the legal sense, concerns the interests of a foreign state rather than those of a private individual or company, and that no suspicion of such state intervention had been reported. Israel's Foreign Ministry told Reuters it was not aware of the company named in reports.
The case has nonetheless rattled LFI, which sits at the center of France's increasingly polarized political landscape. The party, which commands roughly 10 to 15 percent support in polls, regularly faces accusations of antisemitism from Jewish community leaders and political rivals, claims it firmly denies.
Its candidates' targeted pro-Palestinian stances appear to have made them particular points of friction in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict. With France's presidential election scheduled for 2027, LFI said it expected attacks of this kind to intensify, warning that technological developments would "probably multiply this risk considerably."
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