Glucksmann says French intelligence blames GRU for disinformation campaign

Raphaël Glucksmann, the centre-left Member of the European Parliament who is widely expected to contest France's 2027 presidential election, said on Tuesday that French intelligence services had attributed a coordinated disinformation campaign against him to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. The revelation, posted on X, marks the most direct public accusation by a leading French political figure of Russian interference in the next presidential cycle, and it follows a similar report last week involving former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, already a declared candidate.

The alleged operation against Glucksmann

According to Glucksmann, the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security (SGDSN), the prime minister's intelligence coordination body, informed him of a "Russian operation" that was "directly controlled by the GRU." The operation centred on two main artefacts. First, an article published on a website mimicking Blast, a well-known left-wing investigative outlet, designed to appear as legitimate journalism. Second, a social media video clip falsely claiming that Glucksmann's partner, Léa Salamé, anchor of the prime-time news programme on France 2, the main public television channel, had attempted to bribe other journalists to provide favourable coverage of his prospective candidacy.

Glucksmann did not specify when the operation began or how widely the fabricated material circulated. He also did not disclose whether the SGDSN provided technical indicators linking the infrastructure to known GRU units such as APT28 or APT29, though French intelligence has previously attributed election-interference activity to those groups. The Russian Embassy in Paris did not respond to requests for comment.

A pattern of interference targeting French politics

The case against Glucksmann is not isolated. Last week, French media reported that Philippe, who served as prime minister from 2017 to 2020 and leads the centre-right Horizons party, had also been the subject of a Russian disinformation effort. Details of that operation have not been made public, but the timing, two prominent potential presidential rivals targeted within days, suggests a broader campaign rather than an ad hominem attack.

Earlier this year, another strand emerged: several local candidates from La France insoumise (France Unbowed), the left-wing movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, alleged they had been targeted by an Israeli influence firm. Those candidates, many of them vocal advocates for Palestinian rights, reported coordinated online harassment and fabricated documents intended to discredit them. The Israeli firm has not been officially named by French authorities, and the Israeli government has not commented on the allegations.

Why Glucksmann is a target for the Kremlin

Glucksmann's profile makes him a predictable focus for Russian operations. He first came to public prominence during the 2013-14 Maidan uprising in Kyiv, where he reported from the streets and later co-authored a book on the revolution. Since his election to the European Parliament in 2019, he has been among the most consistent voices calling for a hard line against the Russian government, supporting sanctions, military aid to Ukraine, and the acceleration of Ukrainian EU accession talks. He sits with the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group and serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

His likely candidacy would place a staunch Atlanticist and Ukraine hawk in a race that already includes Philippe, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, and potentially a candidate from Macron's Renaissance party. Polling throughout 2025 and early 2026 has consistently placed Glucksmann as the leading figure on the non-LFI left, though his national name recognition remains lower than that of the declared heavyweights. A disinformation campaign launched more than a year before the first round is consistent with a strategy of pre-emptive reputation damage rather than last-minute vote manipulation.

The Israeli firm allegations and the complexity of attribution

The allegations concerning an Israeli firm targeting France Unbowed candidates add a layer of complexity to the interference landscape. Unlike the GRU attribution, which comes from the SGDSN, the Israeli firm claims have not been formally confirmed by French intelligence. They do, however, illustrate that foreign influence operations in France are not exclusively Russian in origin. Israeli private intelligence and influence contractors have been implicated in similar operations in other European countries, often acting on behalf of third-party clients rather than the Israeli state directly. The French government has not publicly linked the two sets of allegations.

Macron's priority and the 2027 election landscape

President Macron, who cannot run for a third term, has made election integrity a signature issue for his final year in office. In a speech to ambassadors last month, he described foreign interference as "the principal threat to our democratic sovereignty" and pledged to harden the legal and technical framework governing online political content. The government is preparing a bill that would extend the powers of the Viginum service, the state agency created in 2021 to detect and attribute digital interference, and would impose stricter transparency obligations on platforms during election periods.

The 2027 contest is already shaping up as a test of those defences. The field is fragmented: Le Pen leads most first-round polls, Philippe polls strongly among centre-right voters, the left remains divided between Glucksmann's social-democratic lane and Mélenchon's radical lane, and Macron's own camp has yet to settle on a successor. In such a fluid environment, even a modest disinformation operation can shift media narratives for days, forcing candidates to respond to fabrications rather than policy.

What French intelligence says and the attribution challenge

The SGDSN rarely speaks publicly about specific attributions. Its decision to brief Glucksmann directly, and his decision to make that briefing public, represents a departure from the usual practice of classified notifications to party leaderships. It suggests the intelligence service judged the threat significant enough to warrant public deterrence, and that it has high confidence in the GRU link. Technical attribution in disinformation cases typically relies on infrastructure overlap with known GRU operations, linguistic analysis, and behavioural patterns such as the timing of posts relative to Moscow working hours. None of that evidence has been released.

For now, the French public has only Glucksmann's account of the briefing. The SGDSN has not issued a statement confirming or elaborating on his claims. That silence is standard: French intelligence does not comment on operational matters. But it leaves a gap that the Russian Embassy's non-denial does nothing to fill. In previous cycles, Moscow has dismissed similar accusations as "Russophobia" or "internal French politics."

The coming months will reveal whether the Glucksmann briefing was a one-off disclosure or the opening of a sustained public attribution strategy by French intelligence. For a political class still scarred by 2017, the stakes are not abstract. As one senior adviser to a major party put it privately this week: "We are not waiting for the leak. We are assuming the operation is already inside the perimeter." That assumption, more than any single fabricated article, may be the most consequential effect of the campaign.

For European readers, the French case is a reminder that the 2024 European Parliament elections, the 2025 German federal election, and the 2027 French presidential election form a contiguous cycle of democratic contests across the EU's three largest member states. The GRU does not observe national borders or electoral calendars. The question is whether the EU's member states can coordinate their defences as effectively as the adversary coordinates its offence. European Parliament officials have privately urged national capitals to share attribution intelligence in real time, but the legal framework for such sharing remains incomplete.