On Monday, May 6, François-Xavier Bellamy, MEP and leading candidate for the French party Les Républicains (LR, right-wing) in the European elections, announced that he had been the target of an espionage operation by China. While French President Emmanuel Macron was receiving his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Paris, Bellamy announced his intention to file a complaint with the special J3 section of the Paris public prosecutor's office for allowing and supporting fraudulent intrusions into an automated data processing system.

In recent weeks, other lawmakers also claimed to have been the target of a Chinese espionage campaign. What do they have in common? All have had ties to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a network of elected representatives, some of whose members have been strongly criticized by Beijing.

"It has now been confirmed that there are seven of us French parliamentarians who were the target of a Chinese state-sponsored cyberattack in early 2021," they said in a press release published on Monday, May 6, calling on the French authorities to sanction those responsible. Hearings led by Olivier Cadic, senator for French nationals living abroad, are also due to take place starting in June, it was announced at a press conference that same day.

The source for these statements was not a French agency but rather the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On March 25, officials there issued an indictment against seven alleged members of APT31. This hacking group, suspected of being directly controlled by a Chinese state body, has been linked to multiple cyber espionage operations over the past decade.

While the report goes into little detail about APT31's operations outside the US, it does mention a campaign orchestrated in January 2021 that involved sending "over 1,000 emails to more than 400 accounts or individuals associated with IPAC." André Gattolin, former La République en Marche (LRM, center) senator, and Anne Genetet, Renaissance (RE, center) deputy, confirmed to Le Monde that they had received an email at the time which contained several images and whose message dealt in particular with the Covid crisis. Both claim to have filed a complaint. Other IPAC elected representatives received similar emails in Belgium, New Zealand, and the UK.

According to information obtained by Le Monde, a meeting between targeted IPAC members and US authorities was held on Thursday, May 9. The French elected representatives involved criticized the French authorities' lack of communication. "We're talking to the European Parliament because we don't know whether the operation has concluded," said Bellamy.

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