To understand the coming French election, we need to start not with the incumbent president Emmanuel Macron, nor with any of his rival candidates, but with a billionaire called Vincent Bolloré.
Like many oligarchs, he started out by inheriting a family business founded by his ancestors – in this case, in the 1820s. These days, the eponymous Bolloré is one of the 500 biggest companies in the world, and has a stranglehold on West African trade, controlling 16 major ports down the coast from Mauritania to Congo-Brazzaville.
The firm doesn’t just have its claws in France’s old colonies. In 2015, Bolloré took control of the French media giant Canal Plus, with Vincent himself taking over as chair. In 2017, the company relaunched its 24-hour news channel as a sort of French equivalent of Fox News, now called C+.
