France Campaign Tests Strained Institutions

France’s presidential campaign is starting before the state has recovered from summer. Tanker trucks are supplying drinking water to towns in Alsace and the Jura, more than 40,000 people have experienced tap-water cutoffs and supply for about 550,000 was judged at risk. Météo-France says soil moisture has reached its lowest level since measurements began. The crisis is no longer a forecast about climate adaptation. It is a municipal logistics operation carried out while candidates argue about who can make the state function.

The digital state failed its own test. Attackers using stolen credentials extracted data on 678,000 people and businesses from the tax administration. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu convened an interministerial crisis meeting, ordered an ANSSI audit and created an emergency cyber unit after the breach joined a wider series of attacks on public services. The administration learned the scale only after the attackers claimed responsibility. Citizens required to disclose income, family and property information now have to trust the same government to explain why it did not see the loss.

Foreign interference is feeding on that weakness. Two new suspected Russian operations against Gabriel Attal brought his total to four in two weeks, including fabricated front pages, false reports and an AI-generated video. Similar campaigns have targeted Édouard Philippe and Raphaël Glucksmann. Some of the material was implausible and written in English; Le Monde has warned that candidates can give weak operations the audience they failed to earn by publicising them. The attackers do not need to persuade a majority if they can make the institutions judging authenticity look partisan.

The budget is the more dangerous institutional deadline. The Inspection générale des finances found that prolonging the special law in place of a 2027 budget would worsen the public balance by at least 0.5 percentage points of GDP, leave ministries about €10 billion short, push the Acoss financing need above €90 billion and block some local investment grants. The European Commission expects growth of only 0.8 percent in 2026 and a no-policy-change deficit of 5.7 percent in 2027. Lecornu wants 4.9 percent, but Jean-Luc Mélenchon has promised to censure the government and the presidential race makes compromise harder.

Raphaël Glucksmann’s entry into the Socialist-led primary sharpens the contest on the left while drought, cyber risk and debt reward simple promises. Yet the state cannot solve any of them through a presidential slogan. Water networks need investment that survives a change of government; cyber defence needs reporting that does not depend on a crisis cell; a budget needs votes from parties preparing to defeat one another. The IGF’s warning is valuable because it translates parliamentary deadlock into costs ordinary administration cannot avoid.

The next tests are concrete: whether water tankers disappear because networks recover rather than rain briefly returns, whether ANSSI publishes actionable findings, whether interference attribution uses a consistent threshold, and whether Lecornu can show a budget coalition before markets price another stalemate. France’s candidates are presenting themselves as alternatives to institutional failure. The winner will inherit those same institutions on the morning after the campaign.