French billionaires skirt campaign funding rules through media control

Individual donors are subject to strict limits on how much they can give candidates in France. So the ultrarich are turning their sights elsewhere. Vincent Bollore, president of the Odet company, former chairman and CEO of the industrial holding company Groupe Bollore, and former executive of a media group, at a hearing before the National Assembly’s commission of inquiry into public broadcasting, in Paris, France, on March 24, 2026. (Xose Bouzas / Hans Lucas via AFP) PARIS (CN) — For French billionaires, one thing can’t be bought — elections. Campaigns are subject to strict financing restrictions; individual donors cannot contribute more than roughly $5,000 to candidates or about $8,700 to political parties. But this doesn’t mean billionaires can’t throw their financial weight behind something else: the political ideologies presented on primetime television. “One of the possibilities is actually to try to influence the public debate,” Abel François, a professor of political economy at EM Strasbourg Business School, said. “That’s something we know fairly well in the academic literature — when you can’t fund an election campaign, you try to influence the media agenda through funding.” France’s wealthiest people are dividing and conquering the media landscape, acquiring TV channels, radio stations and newspapers to go beyond campaign financing and toward changing citizens’ value systems in the long run. “I think these are people who have closely studied the mechanics of communication and psychology, and who use things like the Overton Window, with this idea of normalizing a certain number of ideas that might seem radical at a given time … But which, if they’re repeated, endorsed, spoken enough, end up becoming relatively common ideas,” Olivier Costa, a director at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, said. The Overton Window refers to what is politically acceptable in the mainstream. FILE - In this Oct. 8, 2014, file photo, France's Vincent Bollore, head of the Bollore Group, sits in a customized Autolib electric car in Paris. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon, File) In France, billionaires owning media outlets is not a new phenomenon. But Arnaud Mercier, a political scientist and professor in communication sciences at the Panthéon-Assas University Paris II, explained that traditionally, owning outlets was a way to build privileged relationships with public officials. “It was more about having channels for influence, to have the ear of politicians,” Mercier said. “Because they could actually fear press campaigns going after them if they went against the economic, banking or financial interests of billionaires.” Costa said while some traditional outlets have always had a political slant, their number is growing and the slants are becoming more extreme. Vincent Bolloré, the former chairman and CEO of his family’s Bolloré Group , is widely credited as the driving force behind this change. In 2017, he spearheaded a complete overhaul of the TV channel i>Télé, which was seen as relatively centrist at the time, despite widespread pushback and strikes within the organization. “He’s the first to invest heavily in the media to turn it into a vehicle for ideological influence, because he has a political agenda that is actually also a culture war,” Mercier said. “So with him, it’s not just, ‘I have friends, I’m pretty right-wing, somewhat conservative, so there you go,’ he operates with the mindset of ‘I invest in the media to wage an ideological war, a cultural battle over ideas.’” The channel was ultimately reborn as CNews, a far-right outlet often compared to Fox News. It has been widely criticized for giving a mouthpiece to the extreme-right politician Éric Zemmour , who promotes the “great replacement” theory and was fined over $10,000 for inciting racial hatred in 2022. The investigation came after he said all unaccompanied foreign minors are “thieves,” “murderers” and “rapists” on CN