from 21st Century Wire:
In early May 2026, three pro‑Palestine candidates in French municipal races were hit with a coordinated smear campaign built on lies, synthetic identities and anonymous digital attacks, which French authorities and platform investigators traced back to an Israeli influence construct and the wider cyber‑operations infrastructure behind it. In Marseille, QR codes directed passers‑by to a blog accusing La France insoumise deputy and mayoral candidate Sébastien Delogu of sexual harassment. In Toulouse and Roubaix, similar websites and social media accounts pushed fabricated allegations against François Piquemal and David Guiraud, backed by fake testimonies and AI‑generated visuals. The targets were carefully chosen, and so were the methods. All three candidates are affiliated with “La France insoumise“, the leading left‑wing, ecosocialist movement in France, founded and led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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French authorities quickly moved beyond the idea that this was routine local mudslinging. Reuters reported that investigators were probing whether the Israeli firm BlackCore interfered in France’s 2026 local elections, while Meta removed coordinated inauthentic accounts it said originated in Israel and were linked to the campaign targeting French political figures. Google and TikTok separately detected parts of the same operation during their own monitoring, meaning three major platforms independently identified the same Israeli‑linked network. According to Reuters, French intelligence services are now trying to establish who commissioned BlackCore and what stood behind it, a set of facts that places the firm at the visible edge of a much more complex enterprise built to strike, disappear and leave the deeper structure intact
Public corporate records and archived infrastructure traces point toward that deeper structure. Galacticos Ltd and SNI Digital Ltd are active Israeli companies registered at the same Tel Aviv address, 103 HaHashmonaim Street, alongside Benguy Escrow Company Ltd, a trust vehicle used in cross-border transactions to hold shares and options at arm’s length. An archived login page titled “Avatar Data Generator by Galacticos AI” preserves a surviving fragment of the BlackCore toolchain, days before the cluster was scrubbed. Taken together, these traces point to a layered system: legal insulation at HaHashmonaim, modular influence tooling behind BlackCore, and a broader Israeli cybersphere where elite personnel circulate between deniable operations and regulator-facing businesses.
A smear campaign with a political target
This French case is significant because of who was targeted and why. Delogu, Piquemal and Guiraud all belong to La France insoumise, the most prominent party in France taking an openly pro-Palestine line against Israel’s war on Gaza and against the political consensus shielding it. This was, without a doubt, a political selection and not a simple random opportunism. The operation landed on a current in French politics that challenges Atlantic orthodoxy and rejects the deference expected on Israel.
The alarm in France did not begin and end with Reuters. A Reuters-derived Arabic recap states that France’s Service for monitoring and protection against foreign digital interference, also known as Viginium, first detected what it described as a “limited-range” foreign interference operation targeting a French political force in Marseille, Toulouse and Roubaix, a finding later reported by Le Monde. Le Canard Enchaîné then revealed that French authorities suspected an Israeli company, and Viginum formally warned La France insoumise that its candidates were being targeted. By the time Reuters published its account, the case already had a domestic institutional trail.
The techniques employed were tailored to municipal terrain and suggest professionalism and know-how. Anonymous blogs, QR codes in public space, fake local testimony, AI-generated content and regional media seeding gave the fabrication a neighborhood texture rather than a spectacular national footprint, which made the operation cheaper, deniable and effective at precisely the scale where municipal races can be destabilized by rumor and suspicion. Whoever designed it understood that local politics offers ideal ground for foreign interference because the threshold for contamination is low and the scrutiny often arrives too late.
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