Domestic interference: the list the French Senate will never compile

Saturday 18 July 2026.

Excerpt: The French Senate wants to hunt down “domestic interference,” an oxymoron that turns the critical citizen into a foreigner in his own country. Let’s take them at their word: applied honestly, their own definition points not to alternative media or anonymous accounts, but to the circulatory system connecting the machinery of the French state to McKinsey, Lazard, FTI, and General Electric. From Bruno Le Maire at Macro Advisory Partners to the McKinsey nexus under judicial investigation since 2022, the list is long, documented, and signed off at every step by the official ethics bodies. At the top, the revolving door is an asset; at the bottom, citizen speech is a risk to be mapped before 2027. Domestic interference is real: it doesn’t post, it invoices.

On July 14, 2026, three senators from France’s centrist bloc held a press conference to present a report that deserves a place in the annals of institutional Newspeak. In it, Laurent Lafon, Sylvie Robert, and Agnès Evren propose to combat what they call “domestic interference” (ingérences intérieures). I have already dissected the machinery of Report No. 875: a state disinformation observatory, accounts rendered invisible during election periods, truth defined by regulation. I won’t rehash it here. What interests me now is the phrase itself, and what it reveals once you take it seriously.

Because “domestic interference” is, on its face, an oxymoron. Open any dictionary: interference denotes the intervention of an outside power in the affairs of a state. When the action comes from citizens, parties, associations, or national media, it goes by other names: public debate, activism, opposition. Even among the report’s own architects, Communist senator Pierre Ouzoulias concedes that the phrase is “not very felicitous” and “too vague.” The semantic slide is no slip of the pen. After foreign interference as the all-purpose excuse, here comes domestic interference as the catch-all category: the French citizen becomes the foreigner in his own country.

But let’s take them at their word. If they want a hunt for interference, let’s have one. Honestly. All the way down.

Interference, by their own definition

France’s law of July 25, 2024 on foreign interference came with a meticulous drafting effort. Amendment CL43, introduced by rapporteur Sacha Houlié, defined an act of interference as the deliberate intervention of a natural or legal person intended to “manipulate public discourse,” “influence public policy,” or “harm the fundamental interests of the Nation,” all on behalf of a foreign power.

Now strike the last five words. What remains? Organized actors, commanding considerable resources, who shape public policy in the service of private interests, outside any elected mandate and beyond any citizen oversight. That definition already describes something real. It describes neither a dissident think tank, nor an alternative media outlet, nor an anonymous account on X. It describes the circulatory system that has been irrigating the top of the French state since 2017.

The way out: when a contact list becomes an asset

Start with the classic sense of what the French call pantouflage, the slide from public office into the private sector: those who have exercised power and now monetize their intimate knowledge of the state apparatus on behalf of private, often foreign, interests.

Bruno Le Maire, finance minister from 2017 to 2024, has been a senior advisor at the London-based geopolitical consultancy Macro Advisory Partners since January 2026. Seven years at the finance ministry, seven years of French industrial and fiscal secrets, now placed at the service of international clients.
Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, junior minister for transportation from 2020 to 2022, was named a senior advisor at FTI Consulting in September 2025, to guide clients through “regulated sectors.” Those regulated sectors are the ones he used to regulate.
Emmanuel Moulin, chief of staff to Le Maire, then head of the French Treasury, then secretary general of the Élysée from April 2025 to May 2026, had already made the round trip through Citigroup and Mediobanca before returning to the controls of the state.
Philippe Englebert, President Macron’s Élysée advisor for business and economic attractiveness, has been a director at Lazard since 2022, after starting his career at Goldman Sachs and passing through the Treasury.
Hugh Bailey, an advisor in Macron’s ministerial office at the finance ministry between 2014 and 2016, the very period when the minister approved General Electric’s acquisition of Alstom’s energy business, was appointed CEO of GE France in April 2019. The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation into unlawful conflict of interest concerning him, following a formal referral by MP Delphine Batho. The civil service ethics commission had cleared the appointment. Which is precisely the problem.
Frédéric Michel, a former News Corp lobbyist and later a partner at Lupa Systems, James Murdoch’s investment fund, became Macron’s special advisor for communications in September 2022, before heading back to the private sector at the end of 2023. The man who once carried the Murdoch empire’s interests spent a year steering the French president’s public voice.
Alexandre Holroyd, who worked for FTI Consulting in Brussels and London before founding En Marche’s London chapter, served as a member of parliament from 2017 to 2024 and now lists a position at Oaktree Capital Management, the American asset manager. The full round trip, in a single career.

Every one of these moves is legal. Every one was cleared by the competent ethics bodies. Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it.

The McKinsey nexus: the interference that has its own investigating judge

At the center of the system sits the Firm. I’ve written elsewhere about four years of judicial investigation and the silence that surrounds it; here, let’s simply recall the human network, as the trade press has documented it in connection with the complaints received by France’s national financial prosecutor.

Paul Midy, ex-McKinsey, who became deputy director general of En Marche and now sits in parliament. Ariane Komorn, at McKinsey from 2014 to 2017, then head of the movement’s projects unit until 2021. Mathieu Maucort, a McKinsey project leader from 2013 to 2016, recruited in 2017 to run the campaign’s rapid-response operation, later deputy chief of staff at the junior ministry for digital affairs, then interministerial delegate for youth. Guillaume Liegey, co-organizer of the 2016 Grande Marche canvassing operation. Marguerite Cazeneuve, one year at McKinsey straight out of business school, who went on to become the Élysée’s health advisor and then deputy director of France’s national health insurance fund. Martin Bohmert, head of the Young with Macron youth wing in 2018 and 2019, hired by the firm afterward. Éric Labaye, former head of McKinsey France, picked to preside over the École Polytechnique. And Karim Tadjeddine, the senior partner in charge of the public sector practice, whose McKinsey work address appears in the 2016 campaign correspondence, something he described to the Senate as a mistake.

A dozen consultants working on a presidential candidate’s platform, with no invoice in the campaign accounts, followed by public contracts running into the hundreds of millions of euros: that is a coordinated influence operation targeting the nation’s public discourse and public policy. Two formal judicial investigations have been open since October 2022. If words mean anything, domestic interference exists. It is, in fact, the only kind with its own case file.

The way in: banality at scale

Let’s be honest, because honesty is what separates an argument from a witch hunt: having worked in the private sector before entering politics is not a sin. Élisabeth Moreno came from HP, Jean-René Cazeneuve from Apple, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet spent two years at Kearney three decades before her ministry, Guillaume Kasbarian came out of Monitor and PMP Strategy, Jacques Marilossian out of IBM and Oracle, Olivia Grégoire out of DDB and Havas. Taken one by one, these are the résumés you’d expect in any democracy open to civil society.

It’s the density that gives pause. When nearly an entire political apparatus is drawn from strategy consulting, investment banking, and multinational corporations, and flows back into them, recruitment stops being openness and becomes a filter. One operating system, one analytical grid, one set of converging interests. What I once called the great Macronist prostitution is not an insult; it is a description of flows.

A double standard, fully assumed

Let’s sum up the asymmetry. At the top, France’s High Authority for Transparency in Public Life and the ethics commissions review, authorize, and attach conditions. The system works exactly as designed: it lubricates. No observatory monitors former ministers at their new clients’ offices, no algorithm throttles their reach, no official label flags them as “problematic.”

At the bottom, the Lafon report proposes a state information observatory, up and running before the 2027 presidential election, and procedures for stripping online anonymity on a simple administrative request, with no judge involved. The citizen who criticizes is a risk to be mapped; the minister who cashes out is a resource to be valued. I’ve already shown how the rhetoric of interference works as selective indignation: here it reaches its chemically pure form. You don’t surveil the people who actually influence public policy. You surveil the people who complain about it.

The interference sits on the board

So yes, domestic interference does exist in France. Organized, unelected actors, transnational through their employers and their clients, who weigh on legislation, public procurement, and the state’s own voice, behind an opacity that takes the courts years to pierce. They just don’t post on social media. They invoice. They advise. They appoint. They wait for their turn through the door.

The Senate wants an observatory of speech before 2027. Fine, here’s mine: free, open source, sovereign. It fits in a single question, to be put to every public decision-maker: whom did you work for before, and whom will you work for after? As long as that question has no registry, no monitoring, and no sanction, while citizens’ anonymity gets lifted by filling out a form, the Republic will not have a disinformation problem. It will have a definition problem. And the people holding the dictionary will not hand it over willingly.