[ France ] Election Interference of the Domestic Variety
By decree, Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, has just conjured up yet another useless gadget of an agency. Quiet, please — the government is busy communicating through statutes and regulations.
Good god, Emmanuel Macron’s end of reign is long, calamitous, and even more hopeless than the nine years that preceded it. Laurent Nuñez — tax inspector, then Paris police prefect, then junior interior minister, then head of the domestic intelligence agency, then Interior Minister, eye-gouger-in-chief of the Yellow Vests but otherwise incapable of keeping public order at a single Stade de France football match, just like his predecessor Gérald Darmanin — has just signed decree n°2026-646 setting up a commission to inform the public with a view to prevent the effects of foreign interference during elections.
Under article L. 562-1 of the Monetary and Financial Code and point 9 of article R. 1132-3 of the National Defense Code, this commission will keep watch over attempted foreign election interference. Not a single mention of the electoral code.
Which means this commission can only ever have an informational mission — as its name says, nothing repressive — since it wasn’t created by statute. A statute that, in any case, would never have made it through a parliament where the government holds only a small minority.
