Impact of hacking attack appears minimal in France

Macron data leaks receive little coverage in French media

PARIS — It was only the latest plot twist in a long, bitter campaign defined by rancor and uncertainty.

The day before France’s presidential election, authorities were still investigating the “massive and coordinated piracy action” that candidate Emmanuel Macron reported just minutes before the campaign’s official end Friday night.

The data dump, the Macron campaign said, involved thousands of nonincriminating emails and other internal communications — some of which, the campaign insisted, were fake.

The identity of the hacker remains unconfirmed, but the parallels to the last U.S. presidential election were clear enough: 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 favors pivoting France’s foreign policy toward the Kremlin.

“Intervening in the last hour of the official campaign, this operation is obviously a democratic destabilization, as has already been seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” the Macron campaign said, stopping short of assigning blame.

In the French press, the leaks received comparatively little coverage.

Ben Nimmo, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said in an interview that enthusiasm for the leaks was scarcely discernible beyond the farright, 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 socialmedia patterns surrounding the leaks.

Most French voters interviewed on the streets of the capital the day before the vote shrugged off the hack. The stakes are much too high to be bothered by compromising internal campaign documents, they said.

Paul Lotere, a 29-yearold 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 popularizing the news.