When conservative leader Eric Ciotti plotted his startling alliance with Marine Le Pen, shattering decades of Gaullist tradition, the head of Les Républicains (LR) consulted none of his senior party colleagues – not even Nicolas Sarkozy, the last of his political family to serve as French president.
Instead, the morning after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election on June 9, Ciotti paid a visit to Bolloré, the billionaire corporate raider who has built a sprawling media empire precisely to engineer such an alliance.
The purpose of the visit, revealed by French daily Le Monde, was to “orchestrate Ciotti’s rallying behind the National Rally (RN)” – and to prepare for the backlash it was certain to provoke.
When Ciotti went public the next day, drawing furious condemnation from party officials, Bolloré’s media empire was ready to rally to his defence.
“Eric Ciotti has listened to grassroots supporters; it happens, sometimes, to a political leader,” said Pascal Praud, one of Bolloré’s star anchors, on the tycoon’s flagship broadcaster CNews. He went on to mock Ciotti’s critics within Les Républicains, claiming their rejection of an alliance with Le Pen proved they are “out of touch, lacking in courage, with no future, and clearly unable to understand anything, least of all their voters”.
Meanwhile, on the Bolloré-owned radio station Europe 1, the head of conservative newspaper Le Figaro lambasted the “unfathomable outpouring of anti-Ciotti sentiment”, ridiculing the recent electoral record of “the old barons” of the right. Either Les Républicains team up with the National Rally, Alexis Brézet added, or they are doomed to vanish.
In the run-up to the snap polls, Europe 1 has been told to make space for another of Bolloré’s star television anchors, Cyril Hanouna, who has actively sought to sponsor a wider alliance of rightwing parties on his popular talk show “Touche pas à mon poste”.
On June 13, with Ciotti in his studio along with representatives of the National Rally and rival far-right outfit Reconquête, Hanouna pulled out his phone to call the RN’s new poster boy Jordan Bardella, handing the handset over to his Reconquête guest – Sarah Knafo – and urging her to plead with Bardella for an alliance.
‘A personal victory for Bolloré’
A newly elected European lawmaker, Knafo is the partner of Reconquête founder Eric Zemmour, the former CNews pundit whose presidential run in 2022 enjoyed wide support among Bolloré’s media.
While Zemmour’s Elysée Palace bid eventually foundered, his unrivalled media exposure ensured the far right’s preferred topics – immigration, crime and the perceived threat from Islam – dominated the political conversation. It also furthered blurred the line between mainstream conservatives and the far right, providing fertile terrain for the “union des droites” (alliance of right-wing factions) that has long been Bolloré’s pet project.
“Uniting the French right and carrying it to power has always been Bolloré’s principal aim,” says Alexis Lévrier, a historian of the media who teaches at the Université de Reims Champagne Ardennes.
“That means breaking down the barriers that have long kept the mainstream right and the far right apart – and finding dependable lieutenants, like Eric Ciotti, to bridge the divide,” he adds.
While Ciotti’s alliance with Le Pen is resisted by virtually all heavyweights in his LR party, voter surveys suggest the move may still pay off.
Pollsters say Le Pen’s party, backed by Ciotti and a handful of his followers, is poised to win the largest share of votes in the legislative elections scheduled for June 30 and the following Sunday, possibly even clinching an absolute majority of seats in France’s lower house of parliament, which wields greater powers than the Senate.
The latter outcome would lead to France’s first far-right government since the Nazi-allied Vichy Regime – capping an extraordinary turnaround for an extremist party that was co-founded by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, a Vichy supporter and convicted anti-Semite.
“Bolloré is no personal fan of the Le Pen family brand, but he has recently warmed to the party,” says Lévrier. “In Bardella, whom Le Pen has named as her choice for PM, the National Rally has found a candidate that Bolloré can support.”
He adds: “In every respect, the far right’s likely victory in the upcoming vote would be a personal victory for Bolloré, a vindication of what his media empire was designed to achieve.”
The French Murdoch
A deeply conservative Catholic from Brittany, in western France, Bolloré has emerged as France’s most successful corporate raider, cobbling together a transport, media and advertising empire that stretches across Europe and Africa. Over the past decade, he has gradually expanded his media assets in France to include television channels, a radio station, prominent magazines, France’s leading publisher, its biggest travel retail chain and, most recently, its best-known Sunday paper.
Far from painless, the takeovers have followed a well-honed strategy, says Alexandra Colineau of the media advocacy group Un Bout des Médias.
“The strategy is to buy established titles and empty their newsrooms, moving in like a hermit crab in an empty shell,” she explains. “The shell’s previously acquired credibility is then exploited to advance a radically different agenda.”
After acquiring news channel iTélé, part of the Canal+ group, the Breton tycoon provoked a record strike of 31 days in 2016, got rid of most of the staff and turned it into a conservative platform that critics have dubbed “France’s Fox News”. CNews is now France’s most popular news channel – though its many critics say “opinion channel” is a more accurate description.
The takeover of the Journal du dimanche (JDD) led to an even longer staff walkout last year, triggered by Bolloré’s appointment of a controversial editor-in-chief whose previous tenure at arch-conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelle included a conviction for racist hate speech over cartoons depicting a Black MP as a slave in chains.
The billionaire’s aggressive expansion into media has prompted comparisons with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose myriad news outlets in Australia, Britain and the United States have fundamentally altered the media and political landscapes of those countries.
In both cases, Lévrier pointed to a clear intent to push the debate in a socially conservative direction, pulling strings from behind the scenes while shunning the limelight.
“Murdoch is clearly Bolloré’s model,” he says. “They both have vast and diversified media conglomerates. And they both aim to win elections without ever running for office.”
During the JDD standoff last year, historian David Colon, who has written a book about Murdoch’s media empire, pointed to parallels between the tycoons’ respective holdings, highlighting the impact of synergies between television, radio and print.
“When it comes to media concentration, the key factor is not the number of titles you own or the size of their readership, but rather the diversity of the mediums,” he explained. “It’s this cross-ownership that allows you to set the agenda and rapidly influence public debate.”
In Bolloré’s case, the scale of his assets and their ideological slant have created an unprecedented situation for France, adds Lévrier.
“Never before has so much influence been concentrated in the hands of one man,” he says. “And never before has such influence been used to promote such an extreme agenda.”
The French Fox News
Since 2022, Bolloré has twice appeared before parliamentary committees investigating the unprecedented concentration in France’s media landscape. On both occasions he struck a faux-naïf tone as he belittled his assets and denied any political motive.
“I have no power to appoint people to these channels,” he told a Senate panel when quizzed about his role in the many resignations and high-profile firings that rattled the Canal+ media group following his takeover in 2015. He added: “Some journalists have left, others have returned. It’s like the ocean tide, back home in Brittany.”
Colineau blames a lax legal framework, the bulk of which dates back to 1986, for allowing the likes of Bolloré to concentrate media resources and dictate their will. Her association has come up with a series of proposals designed to ensure journalists have their say on the appointment of editors, but she bemoans a lack of political support.
Media watchdogs also lament a failure to crack down on Bolloré’s media outlets – CNews in particular – over their disregard for public broadcasting rules.
The “French Fox News” has positioned itself as a straight-talking alternative to mainstream media stifled by political correctness, claiming to serve the French public what it really wants. Critics, however, say the channel has repeatedly violated the terms of a licensing agreement that applies to France’s free-to-air news networks, requiring them to provide balanced coverage.
“CNews provides very little actual news and hardly any investigation, which is more expensive to produce,” says Colineau. “It is primarily an opinion channel with a heavy right-wing bias.”
Between them, CNews and its sister channel C8, which hosts Hanouna’s talk show, have received a staggering 44 admonishments from France’s media regulator Arcom. To date, they are the only French channels to have been fined by Arcom – including for inciting racial hatred after Zemmour branded child migrants “thieves, murderers and rapists”.
Earlier this year, the Conseil d’ État, France’s highest civil administration, gave Arcom a six-month deadline to come up with more coercive measures to ensure the likes of CNews respect the rules.
“There are signs that politicians and the authorities are finally waking up to the threat posed by Bolloré’s media,” says Lévrier, noting that CNews’ broadcasting licence is up for renewal later this year.
“I think Bolloré is aware that a number of safeguards could be reinforced in the coming months,” he adds. “In the meantime, his outlets have doubled down on their right-wing rhetoric. They’re no longer even trying to pretend their coverage is balanced.”
In a frantic, three-week election campaign, Bolloré’s pundits have stepped up their attacks against the left-wing New Popular Front, which has emerged as the far right’s main opponent in the upcoming polls. Some have labelled the left the “anti-France” and the “party of foreigners”, echoing the rhetoric used by the anti-Semitic nationalist right that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
Within days of its launch, Hanouna’s new radio programme on Europe 1 has already been put on formal notice by Arcom over its blatantly biased coverage of the campaign and its “virulent” criticism of the left.
Two of Bolloré’s pundits known for their pro-Kremlin views have gone a step further, running for parliament under a joint RN-LR banner.
“Even by the standards of Bolloré’s channels, the radicalism is unprecedented,” says Lévrier, describing the upheaval that has swept French politics in recent weeks as “history accelerated”.
“The Bolloré camp is engaged in a race, a sprint against democratic checks on the media,” says Lévrier. “If it wins that race, we can forget about those safeguards.”
