Fancy Bear in French Elections

The Wall Street Journal writing today claims to have seen a report by Trend Micro that says Fancy Bear has been in the French elections, specifically trying to get into the accounts of employees of the campaign of Emmanuel Macron.  Fancy Bear was said by the former President of Estonia, to be the GRU part of Russian military intelligence.  That is not to say that they have not been trying to get into the other campaigns too, but they were certainly in one.  

In February, one of Macron's aides reported the Russians had been spreading "fake news" about the candidate.  If we put this in the same light at the U.S. Election, the Russians have been favoring candidates that are further right than the other candidates, mostly favoring non-establishment ones.  They don't wait for the election to start, and they will not quit when the election is over.  They want to discredit the electoral systems of democratic countries, while claiming to be one themselves.  We don't have to reflect long on that.  The kind of democracy Russia has is not what the rest of the world calls democracy.  

None the less, their campaigns have been effective at undermining democratic principles and creating the belief that the people are not represented well by their leaders.  In the U.S the number of people approving of the Congressional leadership has dropped to 20% over the last few months since the election.  That is worse than the views towards the least popular President in many years.  I call that success.  

There are always the cause an effect arguments that nobody thinks the Congress or the President are doing a good job, so we can hardly lay the blame for decreasing approvals to the Russians.  Maybe we should start looking closer at this.  The Russians are not the only ones involved;  they just get caught.  The penalty for getting caught should be severe, but it does not seem to be.  Perhaps that means we should consider the words of the Director of National Intelligence when he said "We all live in glass houses."  He was talking about retaliation for the Chinese theft of 28 million personnel security clearance records for which there has been none.  

This type of Political Warfare is ugly, but it does serve one good purpose by exposing the behind-the- scenes maneuvers that get people into office and keep them there.  If we don't like what we see, it may be because politics as practiced today is not what the electorates really want it to be.  Instead of accepting it, we need to do something about it.  Thank the Russians for part of that.  Let's not be too grateful because the real glass houses are in Moscow and Beijing.  They need a big dose of their own medicine.