France's Russia Visas Surge 23% Despite Hardline Rhetoric

France's stated posture on Russia and the actual practice of its consulates ran into each other on May 7. Confidential European Commission figures circulated to capitals and seen by Euractiv showed EU governments issued more than 620,000 Schengen visas to Russian citizens in 2025, a 10.2 percent rise on 2024, with France, Italy and Spain accounting for nearly three-quarters of applications. France's own year-on-year jump was 23 percent — the steepest in the bloc — even though more than 477,000 of those Schengen visas, about 77 percent of the total, were tourist permits.

The figures cut against the November 2025 measure that ended multiple-entry Schengen visas for Russians, a move Brussels had justified by citing sabotage, espionage and weaponized migration. They also cut against the harder line taken by the Baltic states, Finland and Poland, which have closed their land borders to Russian tourists holding Schengen visas issued by other EU states. Several diplomats told Euractiv that Paris was "particularly uneasy" about the data appearing in the Commission's internal Schengen Barometer; the figures vanished from a new edition of the document earlier in 2026 and resurfaced this month, in a separate technical document, only after eight member states pressed for an explanation. The Commission declined to say whether national governments had pushed back. A separate proposal to bar Russians with combat experience in Ukraine is expected before June.

Domestic politics ran on a parallel track that increasingly looks pointed at 2027. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu used his Thursday public schedule to press for swift adoption of the emergency agriculture bill, which the National Assembly's committee passed on May 6 and which is due on the floor on May 19. The text covers water storage and livestock farming; Lecornu said the contested question of phytopharmaceutical products could be split off into a separate bill to keep the urgent package moving.

Former prime minister Gabriel Attal told franceinfo that he was open to a joint strategy with Édouard Philippe to head off a second-round runoff between La France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in 2027. Attal said he had proposed a liaison committee with Philippe's representatives to coordinate timing and conditions for a possible alliance, while declining to say whether he would withdraw in favour of Philippe if polls put Philippe ahead. The proposal is the clearest sign yet that the centre-right and the Macroniste camp are preparing for the structural problem the polls have flagged for months: a left and a far-right capable of crowding the second round.

That conversation about how the centre rebuilds itself sat alongside an unusually candid critique from Yaël Braun-Pivet, the National Assembly president and a Renaissance figure herself. In an interview on France 2's "4 Vérités," Braun-Pivet said power under President Emmanuel Macron had been too vertical, that the Assembly had not been sufficiently listened to, and that the absence of referendums and consultations amounted to a collective failure of method. She also distanced herself from the line Attal is now taking at the head of Renaissance, calling for a more collective approach to decision-making and criticising the party's focus on personalities over substance — a public airing of the tension inside the presidential bloc just as Attal is sketching its post-Macron architecture.

The day's economic-strategic counterpoint came from Wissous, in the southern Paris suburbs. Harmattan AI, founded in April 2024 by 26-year-old Mouad M'Ghari, is being inaugurated by Lecornu and Defence Minister Catherine Vautrin as France's first military-technology unicorn, valued after a $200 million (about €170 million) round in January. The investor list includes Dassault Aviation, maker of the Rafale, and the Wissous plant is sized for up to 10,000 drones per month — a scale that puts a French startup into the same volume bracket the Ukraine war has made the working assumption of European drone planning. The contrast with the morning's visa story was stark: a country whose consulates issued nearly half a million tourist visas to Russian citizens in 2025 is also now industrialising drones for the war Russia is fighting in Ukraine.