French presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron, centre, shown with his wife Brigitte, right, was the target of a document dump. Photo / AP
It was only the latest plot twist in a long, bitter campaign defined by rancor and uncertainty.
The day before France's most momentous presidential election in recent history, authorities were still investigating the "massive and coordinated piracy action" that independent candidate Emmanuel Macron reported just minutes before the campaign's official end on Saturday.
The data dump, the Macron campaign said, involved thousands of nonincriminating emails and other internal communications - some of which, the campaign insisted, were fake.
In a year of populist upheaval, this was the nightmare scenario for many observers, immediately reminiscent of the American election - in which, as US intelligence agencies recently concluded, Russian President Vladimir Putin commissioned an "influence campaign" to benefit Donald Trump.
The identity of the hacker remains unconfirmed, but the parallels were clear enough in Paris and Washington: Macron, an independent centrist candidate and staunch defender of the European Union, is facing off against Marine Le Pen, a far-right populist whose party has relied on Russian banks in the past and who favours pivoting France's foreign policy toward the Kremlin. In March, Le Pen met Putin on a visit to Moscow.
"Intervening in the last hour of the official campaign, this operation is obviously a democratic destabilisation, as has already been seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign," the Macron campaign said, stopping short of assigning blame.
The sentiment was echoed across the Atlantic, with Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warning that the hacking, if successful, "would represent yet another dangerous escalation of cyberinterference in a Western nation's democracy".
But amid France's government-mandated day of silence that always precedes election day - when candidates are strictly prohibited from campaigning in any way - the impact of the leaks on the election remained to be seen.
In the French press, the leaks received comparatively little coverage: In keeping with French campaign law, reporting on the emails' contents could result in criminal charges. Yesterday, France's electoral commission urged journalists and media organisations to heed "the sense of responsibility they must demonstrate, as at stake are the free expression of voters and the sincerity of the election" itself.
Ben Nimmo, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, said that enthusiasm for the leaks was scarcely discernible beyond the far-right, pro-Le Pen online circles that had circulated them in the first place. "It doesn't seem at this stage that there are lots of high-profile non-Le Pen accounts jumping in and spreading the message around," he said of social-media patterns surrounding the leaks.
Most French voters interviewed on the streets of the capital shrugged off the hack. The stakes are much too high to be bothered by compromising internal campaign documents, they said.
Paul Lotere, a 29-year-old civil servant, said he was most upset that Macron had no chance to respond given the strict campaign curfew. He plans to vote for the former finance and economy minister and said he has no interest in the documents until their veracity is confirmed.
"Ah, yes, 'hashtag Macron leaks'," sneered Alain Chappotteau, a 51-year-old psychologist, repeating the Twitter tagline popularising the news. "With all the fuss, all the tricks, in this campaign, what's one more? I'm voting for my child's future. This doesn't matter."
Although the hacker remained unknown, Nimmo said, the social-media campaign following the Macron data dump originated in the United States, in a well-known network of alt-right Twitter accounts. The #MacronLeaks Twitter storm - notably in English, not French - largely began with the account of Jack Posobiec, a Washington-based correspondent for the alt-right website TheRebel.media, Nimmo said. Posobiec has written that he served, in 2016, as "Special Projects Director of Citizens for Trump, the largest Trump grassroots organisation in the US," according to an article Nimmo wrote on the Macron case.
From there, Nimmo said, news of the Macron leaks - allegedly containing details of offshore accounts and tax evasion - was retweeted by William Craddick, another alt-right activist known to have spread in December a fake news story about German Chancellor Angela Merkel tolerating Isis (Islamic State) terrorists to deploy an EU "army" to subdue her country's neighbours. Eventually, Nimmo added, the leaks began to be retweeted by well-known National Front accounts - reaching 47,000 tweets in just three hours.
Despite France's strict prohibition on campaigning after the deadline, Florian Philippot, the National Front's deputy leader, tweeted: "Will #Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism has deliberately killed?"
For months now, Le Pen has also received exceedingly positive coverage in Russian state media. Those news outlets have pilloried Macron, accusing him of being secretly gay and of embezzling public funds. To date, most of those rumours seem to have had little effect on French voters.
In a report issued last month, researchers at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro linked intrusions into the Macron campaign's online network to Russian hackers operating as an arm of Kremlin intelligence. The firm said it was the same group - known variously as Pawn Storm, APT28 and Fancy Bear - that hacked the DNC and officials tied to Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful campaign for president.
Goal: Seeks to tackle 'failed' political system
Who: A 39-year-old former investment banker. Heads En Marche! movement.
Approach: Has pitched a pro-business, EU-friendly campaign.
Background: The son of two doctors, he grew up in the town of Amiens before studying in Paris and at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the breeding ground for France's political and business elite. He also has a masters degree in philosophy and is a prize-winning pianist.
Politics: He served the socialist President Franois Hollande as an economic adviser and in 2014 was appointed Economy Minister, but he stepped down last year to form his own party. Macron insists he is "neither of the left or the right" but "for France".
Policies: He wants to overhaul the "failed" French political system, ease labour laws, slash business tax, reform unemployment benefits, reduce public spending, shrink the public sector, and hire 10,000 more police officers.
Family: He is married to his former French teacher Brigitte, a chocolate maker heiress some 24 years his senior - a relationship that has intrigued the French public.
Goal: Policies are anti-EU and anti-immigrant
Who: A 48-year-old lawyer and daughter of the Front National (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Approach: Marine Le Pen's career has been marked by her effort to distance her far-right party from her father.
Background: Le Pen survived a bomb attack on the family house when she was 8. Her niece is Front National MP Marion Marchal-Le Pen. She became the FN president in 2011 and has tried to "de-demonise" the party - attempting to purge it of its anti-Semitic and xenophobic elements - and make it mainstream.
Politics: Her party's share of the vote has risen steadily. Late last month she temporarily stepped down as head of the party to widen her appeal ahead of the run-off vote, for which she has campaigned on an anti-establishment, anti-EU, anti-immigrant platform.
Policies: She wants to give French nationals priority in jobs, housing and welfare, slap extra taxes on foreign workers and imports, negotiate with the EU for return of "full sovereignty" for France, hold a vote on "Frexit" and possibly stop using the euro as the national currency. She also wants 15,000 more police and 40,000 more prison places.
Family: Le Pen is twice divorced and has three children from her first marriage.
- Addtional reporting: Telegraph
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