In late June 2026, an intruder armed with two stolen passwords wandered freely through French taxpayers’ fiscal records, and the Finance Ministry only grasped the scale of the theft when a hacker calling himself ZeroBytes went public with it two months later. The remediation plan announced in the aftermath reads like a confession: no multi-factor authentication across the board, no consultation quotas, systems without monitoring sensors. Meanwhile, that same state is finalizing mandatory electronic invoicing and DAC8, the largest economic data vacuum in its history. The asymmetry is the whole story: an obligation to surrender everything on one side, a proven inability to protect it on the other. Until the state can demonstrate that it knows how to keep what it already holds, it has no standing to demand more.
Four years of investigation, search after search, and still no resolution: the McKinsey affair is no longer merely a suspicion of irregular financing of the Macron campaigns, it has become a revealing X-ray of how French justice works. The 2022 Senate report established the inconvenient facts: over one billion euros spent on consultants in 2021 alone, and a firm that paid zero corporate income tax in France for ten years. Against that backdrop, comparing judicial tempos is a cruel exercise: an inquiry opened the very day of the revelations for Fillon, immediate enforcement for Le Pen, eight years and a quiet closure for Mélenchon, perpetual suspension for the party in power. One clock, though, is ticking unwatched: Article 67 of the Constitution, which will make Macron an ordinary citizen before the law in June 2027. Seen from that angle, the next presidential election will also be an election about the judicial fate of the previous one.