France 2027 Presidential Election
Dates approved by the Council of Ministers on 1 July 2026. The run-off is held only if no candidate wins an absolute majority in the first round — which has happened at every presidential election of the Fifth Republic.
The first French presidential election since 2017 at which the incumbent is not standing, Emmanuel Macron being barred from a third consecutive term. The 2017 contest ended with a hack-and-leak operation released 44 hours before polls closed, inside the legal reporting blackout; that case is documented here, and it is the reason this vote is worth watching early rather than in its final week.
What to watch
Each point is classified under the same five categories as a documented finding, so an upcoming election reads with the same frame as a past one.
- Foreign interference
Whether a hack-and-leak is attempted against a campaign again, and whether it lands inside the pre-election reporting moratorium, when French media are legally constrained from covering it. That timing was the operative feature of MacronLeaks in 2017, not the contents of the leak.
See the source - Information operations
Whether the Doppelganger network, which has cloned French outlets including Le Monde and Le Parisien, is active around the campaign, and whether platforms act on it faster than in previous cycles.
- Information operations
Whether synthetic audio or video of candidates circulates in the moratorium window, when a denial cannot be effectively reported. Slovakia 2023 is the documented precedent for exactly this timing.
Previously documented in this country
Operations documented against this country
Actors documented in this region
Narratives to expect
Background reading
Sources cited above
Where the date comes from
Scheduled dates come from national election authorities and are linked above. Dates can move; where one is not yet fixed by decree it is marked as expected rather than confirmed. Listing an election here is not a prediction that anything improper will occur — it is a statement about what would be worth checking if it did.