Petty and Grand Maneuvers Before Summer
Marine Le Pen, the ban of AfD's European party, ChatControl: a quick rundown of the three issues dominating July 7th, 2026.
It's amusing to watch the calendar align so neatly — suspiciously accelerated just days before the summer recess. Has a kind of panic gripped the ruling class? Whatever the cause, this Tuesday, July 7th, deserves to be marked with a white stone.
Paris: the 2027 presidential race is decided on appeal
The Paris Court of Appeal will rule tomorrow in the case pertaining to the parliamentary staffers of the Rassemblement National/Front National. Marine Le Pen was sentenced in March 2025 to four years in prison (two of them under electronic tag, two suspended) and five years of ineligibility, with immediate enforcement. That immediate enforcement is what currently bars her from running.
This is no small matter, since the 2027 presidential election hinges on today’s ruling of July 7th. On this subject, listen — or listen again — to the podcast by Régis de Castelnau and Pascal Clérotte. It says it all.
The European Parliament shoud not spare the AfD either
A small bloc holds the levers across every EU institution — Parliament, Commission, and Council alike: the EPP (European People’s Party), the Socialists and Democrats, and Renew Europe (Renaissance, on the French side). Together they command the majority of seats, they’ve locked down every Commission and control bodies, and they’re in favor. To what effect, though? Mostly symbolic. The mechanism itself is limited, because it’s political rather than legal. Strike the ENS off, and the worst that happens is its European funding gets cut. Its MEPs keep their seats, keep voting, keep working. And the AfD and the rest keep operating in their home countries exactly as before.
Chat Control: out the door, back through the window
Amid all this maneuvering — some of it clearly rushed to beat the summer recess — worth flagging is the quiet return of ChatControl 1.0, the transitional version of the EU’s CSAR regulation (Child Sexual Abuse Regulation). Parliament is set to vote on a request for emergency procedure, pushed by its president, Malta’s Roberta Metsola, to relaunch mass, indiscriminate surveillance of private communications. Surveillance MEPs have already voted down twice.
Originally, MEPs had insisted that scans of private messaging apply only to people actually suspected of a crime. When trilogue talks between Parliament, Commission, and Council broke down, Parliament rejected the extension outright, 311 votes to 228.
Shown the door once, the text is now sneaking back through the window.
“The conservative EPP is justifying its emergency-procedure request by pointing to a legal vacuum left by Chat Control 1.0’s expiry in April,” says Patrick Breyer, civil-rights campaigner and former MEP (Pirate Party). “But the German government hasn’t confirmed any drop in reports since the regulation lapsed. Companies are still running voluntary scans, just as they said they would. And by the EU’s own figures, over 60% of suspicious-activity reports come from scanning public posts and cloud storage — areas this regulation doesn’t even touch legally.”
What makes the move so blatant is that it exploits a shift in the rules themselves. At first reading, Parliament only needs a simple majority of votes cast to set its position — whoever happens to be in the room; that’s how 311 to 228 was enough to kill the extension in March. Second reading is a different game entirely: to reject or amend the Council’s position, Parliament now needs an absolute majority — 361 of 720 seats — present or not. Schedule the vote for July 9th, the eve of the summer break, when the chamber is already thinning out, and the arithmetic tilts neatly the other way.
“So the expired Chat Control 1.0 would be reinstated even without Parliament’s consent,” Breyer sums up — over the heads of MEPs who already voted against it, and past years of warnings from cybersecurity researchers.
Since 2023, more than 800 experts across 37 countries have signed a string of open letters condemning the ChatControl project. Technically unworkable, fundamentally at odds with end-to-end encryption, riddled with “unacceptably high” error rates and “serious proportionality problems” — that’s the verdict of two of those experts in a fresh warning sent to MEPs just this weekend.
“We’re deeply worried next week’s vote will confirm our fears,” write Bart Preneel (KU Leuven) and Carmela Troncoso (Max Planck Institute). “It’s rare for the scientific community to reach this level of consensus and speak as one — that alone should signal how serious this is, and what’s at stake if this proposal goes through. And still, none of its fundamental technical flaws have been fixed, despite everything we’ve already said.”