On May 20, the hearing of a French billionaire before a parliamentary inquiry committee was intended to lift the lid on what the committee had earlier called an “outright ecosystem of political conquest.”
The lid, however, had to be kept tight because Pierre-Edouard Sterin didn’t show up to the National Assembly.
Originally, French lawmakers wanted to question the billionaire founder of Smartbox — a company that sells experience gifts — on his Pericles project, through which he’s invested about €30 million ($34.24 million) in initiatives promoting his conservative values.
“Yesterday, Mr Sterin told us he wanted to testify via video link for security reasons,” the committee’s president, Thomas Cazenave, told reporters in Paris, while pointing to an empty chair in a sideroom, where Sterin was supposed to sit.
“I replied that we had taken appropriate measures to protect him, just like for lawmakers who regularly receive threats,” Cazenave — a lawmaker for the government coalition Ensemble! — stressed, adding that he deplored Sterin’s “stalling technique.”
“It means we won’t be able to verify whether Pericles respects French campaign rules,” Cazenave added.
The Pericles project’s general director, Arnaud Rerolle, had shown up for a hearing a week earlier, saying France’s “economic, social and moral situation is in a dire state.”
“We’re an incubator on the right of the political spectrum for meta-political projects. So far, we have financed less than 15% of the 600 applications we received,” he told the committee.
Among the initiatives supported by Pericles are far-right magazine L’Incorrect and the Observatoire du decolonialisme, which, for example, denounces what it calls “woke obscurantism” — a catch-all term used to decry left-wing ideologies, often centered on the identity politics of minorities.
However, Sterin is not the only billionaire trying to steer French political opinion towards the far right and notably Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN).
Interference is ‘problem for democracy’
Rerolle refused to unveil the names of all the supported projects — less than a third of which are known. But he said Pericles didn’t finance political candidates, which is legally allowed only for political parties under French campaign financing laws.
Pierre-Yves Cadalen, a lawmaker for the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI) and the committee’s vice president, calls Rerolle’s statement “wishy-washy.”
“Daily newspaper L’Humanite published an internal document, according to which Pericles aims to help the far right National Rally (RN) win 300 cities in the 2026 municipal elections,” Cadalen told DW.
During his hearing, Rerolle had confirmed the document was genuine, but called it “outdated.”
According to Rerolle, €150 million will be spent over a decade to fight against Islamism, immigration and gender ideology and work towards a victory at the 2027 presidential and parliamentary elections. RN President Jordan Bardella and RN presidential candidate Marine Le Pen are being qualified as “people of trust.”
“It’s a problem for democracy when billionaires interfere this much with political life,” Cadalen said, adding that he wasn’t only talking about Sterin.
In France, 80% of the daily news outlets are owned by 11 billionaires, with their TV and radio stations reaching more than half of the country’s audience.
Cadalen thinks that Vincent Bollore — the majority shareholder of logistics and communication group Bollore — especially wields “huge influence through his media conglomerate, which includes TV channel CNews, radio station Europe 1, the weekly JDD, plus polling institute CSA.
“Together, they have huge firepower and spread far-right narratives that are then picked up by other media,” said Cadalen.
Abel Francois, professor for political economy at Strasbourg University, says that wealthy individuals wielding so much influence is “relatively new” to French politics. “Billionaires used to buy up media to influence politicians, for example, to be chosen in public tenders. Today, it’s about boosting a certain ideology,” Francois told DW.
In public interviews, Bollore has maintained he has no influence on the content of his media.
DW’s requests for interviews with both Bollore and the Pericles project remained unanswered.
Journalists, researchers and the culture sector ‘going quiet’
Meanwhile, France’s concentration of media ownership has far-reaching consequences, says Amaury de Rochegonde, an economic journalist at weekly magazine Strategies and public radio station RFI.
Journalists “self-censor” when it comes to reporting about those billionaires because no-one wants to get “on the wrong side of a potential future employer.”
What’s more, the billionaires are teaming up, Rochegonde told DW. “Bollore and Sterin are known to have met. Both are pushing for a union of the right, meaning an alliance between the conservative Republicans’ right wing and the RN”, he said.
Alexis Levrier, a media historian at northern Reims University, has experienced what it means to rattle the Bollore cage.
“I received thousands of messages with insults and even death threats, including from an arms dealer,” Levrier told DW in one of his first interviews on the issue since late February.
Back then, he told daily newspaper L’Opinion that he supported a decision by the French media watchdog to revoke the license for C8, one of Bollore’s TV stations. The withdrawal came after C8 was found to have ignored dozens of formal reprimands, including for sexism and homophobia.
Levrier believes that another of Bollore’s media outlets, CNews, should receive a similar sanction for unleashing a hate campaign against him.
“Many fellow researchers don’t dare to speak up against the Bollore empire any more. The cultural sector has also gone quiet, although artists used to be staunch advocates of humanist values,” said Levrier.
French lawmakers seek countermeasures
Yet Bollore and Sterin are exceptions among entrepreneurs, says Herve Joly, a historian at national research institute CNRS, because hardly any business leader openly supported the RN.
“In the past, employers didn’t endorse the far right before it came to power. They tended to back established, conservative parties. Nowadays, entrepreneurs even promote progressive values, such as gender equality and the fight against climate change,” he told DW.
At the same time, he warns that this could change if the far right were to rise to power. “In Germany, company bosses cooperated with Hitler after he had taken over and even consolidated his power.”
LFI lawmaker Pierre-Yves Cadalen wants to prevent that with “new regulations against market concentration” in French media.
“Reactionary forces are using these platforms to push for dismantling our rule of law just like in the US,” he said, noting that US President Donald Trump had long ignored court rulings against him, with far-right media outlets, such as Fox News, “cheering him on.”
But Ensemble! lawmaker Eleonore Caroit, also a member of the investigative committee, doesn’t think that new laws are needed.
“We can fight against projects like Pericles by laying them bare,” she told DW. “I’m sure that’s why Sterin didn’t show up for the hearing.”
The French billionaire now risks two years in prison and a fine of up to €7,500.
Edited by: Uwe Hessler
