Behind the Scenes, Billionaires Shape French Presidential Campaign

[Celerity]

In a nation with strict political finance laws, control over the news media has provided an avenue for the very rich to influence elections, this one more than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/world/europe/france-presidential-election-media-cnews-.html



PARIS — The face of President Emmanuel Macron’s possibly fiercest rival in France’s coming election is not on any campaign poster. He has not given a single speech. His name will not be on the ballot.

He is not a candidate at all, but the man often described as France’s Rupert Murdoch: Vincent Bolloré, the billionaire whose conservative media empire has complicated Mr. Macron’s carefully plotted path to re-election by propelling the far-right candidacy of Éric Zemmour, the biggest star of Mr. Bolloré’s Fox-style news network, CNews.

With the first round of France’s presidential election just a month away, polls show Mr. Macron as the favorite. But it is Mr. Zemmour who has set the themes of the race with the openly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views he had put forth each evening on television for the past couple of years. “Bolloré’s channels have largely created Zemmour,” François Hollande, France’s former president, said in an interview.

But Mr. Zemmour’s emergence is just the latest example of the power of France’s media tycoons, Mr. Bolloré most prominent among them, to shape political fortunes. In a nation with very strict campaign finance laws, control over the news media has long provided an avenue for the very rich to influence elections.

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