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For Thierry Breton, the recent demonstrations, just like the Ceuta crisis this summer, testify to a lack of mastery by European countries over their informational space. Do you agree?
Kevin LimonierWe have seen interpretations emerge suggesting that foreign powers would, if not instigated, at least accompanied the violence.
Two questions must be distinguished. The first concerns mastery of the informational space. On that front, I fully agree with the parallel drawn with Ceuta: there has been a malfunction in monitoring the Spanish borders this summer, and specifically in the virtual projection of these borders, with authorities who did not foresee an event they should have anticipated.
And the second?
It concerns the ongoing interferences in several European countries. But claiming that the demonstrations were fomented by foreign powers poses a fundamental political danger.
First, because it allows numerous leaders to dodge their responsibilities. Second, because it amounts to participating in campaigns of self-deception. It’s the same as when Gabriel Attal was targeted by operations this summer. I had said at the time that it must be avoided, because the Russian actors were waiting for exactly that. It is part of their business model, which is to occupy the center stage and to be perceived as very powerful.
In the face of the violence we are witnessing in France, Italy, and elsewhere, it is dangerous to place these interference operations at the center of concerns, because that amounts to ignoring the real problem of inequalities. However, it is certainly true that Russian and Iranian actors, among others, are arsenaling, amplifying, and manipulating these events. The opposite would be quite surprising.
In what way do Russian operations fit into a political war? How do they differ from the endogenous, politically exploited phenomena that we observe?
Marion SollettyThere is a genuine difference in kind between operations meticulously assembled by agents in the pay of Russia, which then reverberate in the media and produce a destabilizing effect, and the demonstrations in France today, which have a completely organic origin. They arise from the demands of high school students or other segments of the population about their living, working, or study conditions, and are subsequently instrumentalized by foreign leaders because it serves their ideology.
As for the lack of mastery of the informational space, if the government is harshly criticized for its management, it is because it failed to spot certain signals visible online about both the scale and the nature of the movement, particularly that rioters and looters were organizing.
It is difficult, in part because it takes place on networks like Snapchat, which operate in real time and where content disappears. Still, as early as Friday, several actors monitoring social networks and the virality of certain keywords could see the scale of Saturday’s mobilization forming. Why weren’t territorial intelligence, and by extension the Interior Ministry, able to take this into account in the subsequent plan?
One of the conclusions of your book concerns “risk 2027”: the internal divisions of Western societies, notably French society, could be weaponized by Russian operations, either in a very concrete way, by targeting candidates or a precise list, or through operations aimed at exacerbating existing tensions. What can we expect? How does Russia exploit a tense situation like today’s?
Marion SollettyThere are two phenomena. On the one hand, the amplification and distortion of existing phenomena have been well documented and monitored, notably by Virginum. That is not the greatest risk for the coming months. On the other hand, there are physical and informational attacks that could intensify. In recent weeks we have talked a lot about cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure, but they could also strike supermarkets, for example.
Explaining that the demonstrations were fomented by foreign powers represents a fundamental political danger.
Kevin Limonier
The lack of public understanding of the ideological underpinnings of these acts represents a deep risk. Russia does not seek chaos for chaos’ sake: it aims to undermine the foundations of our democracy to weaken a political and geopolitical adversary. We have a hard time understanding that.
Why?
Because we are not at all formed by the same cultural, historical, and political mold. Our memories of the Cold War are too distant, unlike other countries that lived through it more directly. Citizens are poorly informed about what is happening, and we do not realize it because we think some things are now known to all. The entire doctrine of destabilizing the West, perceived as the enemy to be defeated in a broader conflict, is very poorly understood.
Can we say that the United States pursues a similar objective, namely to undermine the foundations and values of liberal democracy?
Maud QuessardI would not use terms like “undermine” or “subversion,” because they imply a gray area. Here, U.S. interference is not subtle but overt. We are not in gray, but in black and white. What differentiates our era from the Cold War is that George Kennan’s 1948 strategy was classified, while the National Security Strategy published in December 2025 is not a doctrine piece for foreign policy practitioners. It is a propagandistic document that articulates the United States’ intent to see an intra-Western ideological schism.
In my view, this destabilizes our mental maps as Europeans far more than the U.S. desire to undermine our institutions. We have difficulty understanding that there can be enemies within the Atlantic alliance.
The American narrative about Islamo-leftism in France and the great replacement is not a Trumpist whim. It is carried by the American far right since the 2010s, with an ultraconservative camp crusading to explain how Europe, and France in particular, is corrupted by immigration. Today, that narrative has a very clear and pragmatic objective: on November 3, the midterm elections will take place. The vice president and the president’s discourse could not be any clearer.
Moreover, it explicitly targets France, while protests occur elsewhere as well.
Maud QuessardAbsolutely, it focuses on what happens in France, not in Europe or other countries where youth movements are also present. If we look worldwide, we see massive protests in India, as well as a very strong social mobilization on social networks, often with much more intensity.
Should we talk about hybrid warfare or political warfare?
Maud QuessardThe term “political warfare” is very relevant because Americans have never really deviated from it. When collaborating with North American practitioners of information warfare, one repeatedly hears the same thing: simplify the concepts and stop talking about disinformation, manipulation, or subversion. What matters is political warfare. It is not the medium or technological tool. What is powerful is the message.
Today, however, the United States under Donald Trump carries a clear message: intra-Western decline. They offer a new model that is not the one they promoted during the Cold War. Now it is a techno-libertarian model that is primarily conservative and religious. It is this dimension that leads to commentary first on what is happening in France.
Will this political warfare survive Donald Trump?
Maud QuessardThis political warfare comprises hundreds of thousands of battalions and divisions. It is organized around foundations, think tanks, and universities that support a civilizational project more led by J.D. Vance than by Marco Rubio.
Is he the one who will carry this project after Donald Trump?
Maud QuessardThe post-Trump era will see a strong MAGA camp led by J.D. Vance and backed by two components: religious conservatives and techno-libertarians, the latter being more involved in the financial side than the ideological one. It is Vance’s theological-political project that will dominate and that goes well beyond the simple populist rhetoric advocating the overturn of democratic institutions. It is a civilizational project that has a single driving force capable of uniting all MAGA followers: the fear of decline.
Russia does not seek chaos for chaos’ sake: it aims to undermine the foundations of our democracy to weaken a political and geopolitical adversary.
Marion Solletty
It is not a novelty of the 21st century; this fear runs through the entire history of American politics. It was theorized at the end of the 1980s by Paul Kennedy and has only grown in various forms. The U.S. vice president discovered this grand crusade and converted to Catholicism in 2019, trying precisely to put words to his own history and to carry this project. He is not alone: the idea has taken hold within U.S. state apparatuses, but also in Europe.
France is the second most targeted country by Russian interference after Ukraine. How can we explain this centrality?
Marion SollettyRussia’s actions are more legible than those of the United States because its war objectives are known. France is targeted for a primary reason: its military power and its capacity to mobilize politically. If France is not the leading financial contributor to aid Ukraine, it has nevertheless helped mobilize political energies around Emmanuel Macron’s volunteer coalition. It is targeted by political operations because it also presents a significant vulnerability: its current divisions, a highly polarized landscape, and historically high susceptibility to Russian discourse.
Kevin LimonierI see three reasons why France is targeted by Russia: a contingent reason, a structural reason, and an internal reason within Russia itself. The first is an approaching election that could tilt the balance of power, which is a key issue for Russia. The regime and its leaders are computing their survival in Ukraine: they cannot afford to lose this war. In Russia there are deeply structural narratives that losing a war perceived as separatist — as in Ukraine today, as in Chechnya in the past — would trigger the disintegration of the Russian Federation. Garry Kasparov even said: “The war in Ukraine is to Russia what the Algerian War was to France,” the war that country must lose to end its imperial syndrome. The question remains whether Russia can survive its imperial syndrome.
We have had ideological narratives in the past about supporting the National Rally. I think today Moscow is no longer in that lane. Russian elites are in such a survival mode that anything they can mobilize to subvert our political system, on the right or the left, will be deployed, whatever the ideological coherence. That coherence no longer matters to the Russian patrons.
What is the third reason?
Kevin LimonierIt is internal to Russia, a country inherently anglophile in culture that has always viewed France with mixed, but often positive, sentiments. Do not forget the role that French culture played during the Soviet era. In 2012 I was in Moscow during François Hollande’s election. Putin had returned to power in March, after major protests in Moscow marked a historical turning point. On the Russian social networks at that time, a post went viral. It showed two images: François Hollande walking down the Champs-Élysées among a crowd, and Putin heading to the Kremlin for his inauguration, in a Moscow emptied of its inhabitants, with the caption: “That’s what democracy looks like.” This kind of imagery may seem from another world, but it remains anchored in the Russian collective imagination. Simply, it is a country currently undergoing unprecedented oppression since the Stalin era, so this is deeply buried.
Is the notion of a collective imagination applicable to the American case?
Maud QuessardThe notion of a collective imagination is highly relevant because not everything is shaped by social networks. There is indeed a special relationship between France and the United States, that of sister republics, born from a model of a Republic facing an empire. This reading is key to understanding France’s relationship with the United States: we have always sought to remain a Republic and a social democracy. This is what has been expressed in recent weeks in the street, facing the new empire, surely that of Trump.
Are the United States and Russia employing the same methods in Europe?
Marion SollettyWe all agree that there is an ideological alignment between Russia and a significant portion of the MAGA movement on the idea that Europe is undergoing civilizational decline. However, the means used are quite different. That does not mean there are no common points, but in the United States, the will to influence European political debate and support for the parties they call “patriotic” is presented in a very official manner, whereas Vladimir Putin has never publicly claimed the operations conducted in Europe.
More generally, American foreign policy today rests on several pillars: an ideological current, but also a very pragmatic and opportunistic current, as seen in Donald Trump’s actions and the operations he chooses to pursue, as well as financial and economic interests. One even sees positions shift from one day to the next. What is certain is that we have recently experienced a new moment of vertigo as Trump aligned himself with positions coming from Russia, particularly regarding Ukraine. This was already the case in early 2025, with the Oval Office scene and the Munich speech. We are reliving the same thing, but with the pendulum swinging back and forth. It is highly destabilizing for Europe, because it comes from a formally allied country with which we try to preserve what can be preserved in the relationship, especially security cooperation.
Kevin LimonierBetween the United States and Russia, there is first and foremost an ideological, and very likely strategic, convergence in Washington’s aim to pursue what Sofi Oksanen called the “Finlandization” of Europe. That is, transforming Europe into what Finland was during the Cold War: a buffer power, a neutral zone of agreement between two poles of power.
On the Russian side, there is an obsession that France and Europe would threaten the very integrity of Russia’s imperial structure. Remember that the Ukraine war began when the Ukrainian president refused, in late 2013, to sign the association agreement with the European Union, triggering popular protests. This is the beginning of everything we are living today, and the Russians are acutely aware of it.
On the American side, they are now seeking a strategic remodel, meaning they want a realignment of Europeans toward their own priorities at the moment and a certain worldview. This implies weakening European structures because there is a strong intolerance for any form of European strategic autonomy or power. For various reasons. This seems absolutely central to me.
Can we therefore speak of complementarity rather than convergence?
Kevin LimonierYes, what we are seeing today is that there is, on both the American and the Russian sides, an instrumentalization and arming of Europe’s strategic dependencies. On the American side, there is an assault from above, by the major platforms and through all our digital dependencies. The Russians, for their part, are engaging in a form of cyber guerrilla warfare that takes advantage of the cyber landscape, i.e., the dependence on algorithms designed by American platforms.
It’s a bit like in the oceans: whales are accompanied by small fish that thrive in their wake. Russia, a regional power trying to act above its weight and remain a global power, is in such structural weakness that it needs American algorithms to reach Europeans.
Maud QuessardThere are points of convergence on the civilizational and ideological shift, also driven by religious convergences, and many circulations that go not only from Russia to the United States, but also from the United States to Russia.
Then there is this paradox: the giant American is more predatory, but struggles to wield the coercive tool to its full extent. One might be surprised by this when looking at tariffs, the breaking of intelligence, etc. But in reality, it is not surprising, because when we look at the objects that occupy us, namely persuading and winning adherents to the model, there is no genuine adherence. What bothers the Americans today is that people no longer embrace what they propose. The United States today faces this difficulty in fully delivering this civilizational shift.
You agree that there is a will for civilizational change in Europe, a will shared by Russia and the United States, and that their actions are complementary. Several key elections will take place in Europe by the end of 2027: how can we get out of this stranglehold?
Marion SollettyAs a media outlet, we have a responsibility to contextualize things and not talk about them lightly. I completely agree with Kevin Limonier on what happened during the summer: these were low-intensity operations with very limited impact. Raphaël Glucksmann and Gabriel Attal discussed them, and that is what made them known. As a media outlet, we are also alert to these operations, but we often choose not to discuss them because we consider them not to be information of public interest.
We have difficulty understanding that there can be enemies within the Atlantic alliance.
Maud Quessard
So there are two aspects. One is within our remit: to inform the public properly and to raise awareness on these subjects. The other is political: to reduce dependencies toward a number of powers. If we want to be more autonomous and independent, we will have to end a number of structural dependencies. It is a strong political choice, but as a journalist, my role is more to tell what happens than to take part in this debate.
Kevin LimonierJournalists are perhaps one of the professions with the greatest leverage on these issues. Our role as researchers is different. There is a political response to be made regarding strategic dependency. But there is another fundamental political question. Many academic studies show that interference operations take hold in political and social contexts that are extremely degraded.
These works show that Russia has made arming marginalities of society one of its main levers of influence. It was already the case with the Yellow Vests, and it is what is happening in many countries. We can borrow Ronald Ramos’s expression “geography of anger” to explain political crises in the Sahel, notably Burkina Faso. The mechanism is the same: these operations have, or could have, an effect because they rely on something. They rest on frustrations, on a sense of exclusion.
Until we collectively work to understand that fighting interference is a public policy matter in the broad sense — not only sovereign, but involving the entire state, from the Ministries of Youth and Sports to the DGSE — we will not move forward. But for that, it is necessary that current leaders engage in some form of self-critique, which, as current events show, they are not yet fully ready for.
Interferences thus reveal the fragilities on which we must work.
Kevin LimonierExactly. I also regret that the progressive camps do not seize this question more and that they do not realize that social inequalities also constitute strategic vulnerabilities.
Maud QuessardI can only agree with that. There is a major vulnerability that we have not worked enough on, present in recent developments but not limited to these past weeks or to October 17: the generational rift and the politicization, or the non-politicization, of young people. This is a finding that other Western democracies have also made: we have not prepared the next generation of political decision-makers. This is perhaps a job better suited to teachers-researchers.
This fracture also shows up in attitudes toward politics and in the ability to engage. Today, if our institutions are criticized, if they do not function, if our public services are failing — as current demands indicate — and if this endogenous narrative, grounded in a verifiable experience and not needing foreign actors, is amplified by the idea that our institutions must be entirely remade, then perhaps pedagogical work has not been done: on how institutions operate, on the notion of engagement, and on how to reshape them from within. We have not done enough to cultivate the next generation of enlightened political decision-makers — perhaps the term is a bit strong. It is also reflected in our hyper-polarized politics.
How to rekindle all of this?
Maud Quessard Everything flows, there is a lot of amplification, and informational spaces are inherently entirely interconnected. So why do we keep living in our intra-European bubbles lamenting our decline, without recognizing that there are solutions elsewhere? Why aren’t we pedagogical enough in France to show that Europe’s defense isn’t just a concept? Why doubt that our Canadian partners have concrete, operational military cooperation proposals and not just prospective ones? We must tell people, and especially the youth, because we tend to think that it’s always for later. We have levers, but we overlook them and do not talk about them enough. It is not that hard to explain: I’m sure any of our fellow citizens can understand what military and intelligence cooperation with partners sharing our values means, including non-European ones.
And this is not Finlandization — the Finns themselves are far from the Finland of the Cold War. There is a bloc that resists this predatory world, squeezed between Russia, the United States, and China, and which carries values and hope. The Baltic states and the Nordic countries are much more exposed, and yet much more combative and less defeatist.