"Ten Minutes To Midnight on Putin's Clock" (preprint)
A preprint paper from the Institut des Systèmes Complexes de Paris Île-de-France:
The Politoscope project has been observing political activism on X since 2016. We have developed methods for analyzing social and debate dynamics, as well as opinion manipulation. By accelerating these social dynamics, it is possible to characterize a process of weakening and then inversion of the Republican front in the run-up to the 2024 legislative elections, and to identify the subversion strategies that have fostered it. These low-intensity strategies, driven or influenced for the most part by the Kremlin, are being deployed on timescales too long for the players in the debate to be aware of them. Their aim is to destructure French society systemically, in order to bring about a transition to a closed society or illiberal democracy. In a context of brutal reconfiguration of the political space following the dissolution of the National Assembly, the Kremlin's efforts are about to pay off. This study identifies a convergence of interests between Putin's regime and the French far right. It explains some of the active measures put in place by the Kremlin since at least 2016 to destabilize French society, and shows how some of them are entering into synergy these days to bring down or even reverse the Republican front. This is the final stage before the takeover of France by political figures less hostile to Putin's regime. In this scheme, political communities concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia are being weaponized to compromise any barrage against a trivialized far-right in the second round of legislative elections.
Tags: france politics russia bots twitter social-media disinformation preprints papers