PARIS — Not long ago, Philippe Vardon was an anti-immigrant activist best known for carrying out shock propaganda operations, like occupying mosques or serving pork-laced soup to the homeless in Nice, the southern French city that has a large Muslim population.

Today, he is a top general in the sophisticated social media campaign working to get Marine Le Pen — the leader of the far-right National Front party — elected as president of France.

The National Front has long been at the cutting edge of digital communication — it was the first party in the country to put up a website in the mid-1990s — and has invested aggressively in its social media operation. The investment is paying off as Le Pen boasts the highest social media “engagement rate” (measured by likes and follows) of any presidential candidate, while commanding legions of online volunteers in France, Europe and beyond who work each day to amplify her message.

Le Pen’s web-centric insurgent approach mimics methods used by other outsider campaigns. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the electioneering efforts of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the U.S. all made creative use of social media to short-circuit traditional media.

Yet in France, the National Front’s online campaign remains unique. Bigger and more professional than social media operations of rivals including former Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, her web machine stands alone notably due to the ruthlessness of its negative campaigns, and the fact that so many “global populists” are willing to amplify them online.

If the polls are to be believed, Le Pen is likely to win the first round of the presidential elections in April, but lose in the runoff two weeks later.

Its epicenter, known as l’Escale (“The Stopover”) to insiders, lies in a tony apartment building in western Paris, a short walk away from the Place de l’Etoile (POLITICO was offered a tour before being told one would not be possible). There, amid batteries of Apple computers, some 15 permanent web staffers work in a studious atmosphere to craft, package and broadcast Le Pen’s “official” campaign content, branded “MLP2017.” This group is tied to a wider circle of volunteers who relay the message and broadcast their own unofficial content.

But at the heart of the operation are the message-makers, people like Vardon. Described by his colleagues as the party’s “king of agitprop,” Vardon is a key member of the “Ideas and Images” unit in Le Pen’s presidential campaign. Operating in tandem with the web staff, this small group of senior National Front officials provides the fuel for the party’s social media engine, carrying out research, crafting memes and coordinating the party’s effort to discredit opponents.

If the polls are to be believed, Le Pen is likely to win the first round of the presidential elections in April, but lose in the runoff two weeks later. What Vardon and his colleagues are hoping to do is translate their online advantage into enough of a boost at the ballot box to upset that prediction.

Experts, burned by shock results in the U.S. and the U.K., concede that Vardon just might have a chance. “What we observed during the Brexit campaign, and then in the U.S. presidential election, is that the winning parties also had very strong social media campaigns,” said Albéric Guigou, head of Reputation Squad, a social media consulting agency. “In France, the National Front clearly has a major advance in this area on its rivals, both in terms of popularity and their methods.”

A campaign is born

In interviews with POLITICO, members of the ideas and images unit described their offices as a “creative space” that functioned like a startup. Its members credit Vardon with dreaming up one of party’s biggest online campaigns: #LeVraiFillon (or “#TheRealFillon”) — a multi-platform effort dedicated to “unmasking” former French Prime Minister François Fillon after he won the conservative party’s primary in November.

“Vardon is a specialist in all those things, the agitprop aspect,” said Sébastien Chenu, another member of the ideas and images unit, and Le Pen’s cultural adviser.

Vardon is a former member of the “Bloc Identitaire,” a hardcore nativist regionalist movement in southern France. He joined the National Front two years ago as a candidate on the list led by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a niece of the party leader, in regional elections. His energetic performance won him rapid promotion; he was quickly tapped to join the inner circle of Le Pen's campaign, where he wasted no time in making a name for himself.

In an interview with POLITICO, Vardon played down his role in the campaign. Describing himself as a “classical Leninist” activist (a trait he shares with U.S. presidential adviser Steve Bannon), he said he preferred to work in a team and brushed off the suggestion that he was a social media expert. “I know the codes and I use them, but I am not a specialist, a geek ... I am more accustomed to the stairwell,” he said, referring to his previous work courting voters in apartment buildings.

But he did describe how his team had adjusted to Fillon’s unexpected victory in the right-wing primary. “We were surprised, like everybody,” said the heavyset 36-year-old. Over the next few days, they parsed every political book and major speech given by Fillon on the lookout for phrases they could lift and use against him.

The National Front’s online supporters include a nebulous group of activists known in France as la “Fachosphère” (named after an investigative book by two French journalists).

The material was turned over to the party’s in-house graphic designers, who created a library of meme-like images attacking Fillon, while video editors created shareable content on the same theme. On the evening of November 27, orders went out for the National Front’s youth wing to pump out the video material, consisting of friendly-looking cartoons, as senior campaign officials released the memes. The first salvo — attacking Fillon for having favored providing shelters for migrants while reducing public servants by 600,000 — was sent out by the Twitter account of Nicolas Bay, Le Pen’s election strategist. It hit his followers’ feeds just as Fillon was taking to a podium to proclaim his victory.

“Everything was ready to go,” said Gaëtan Dussaussaye, director of the youth wing. “Instructions went out to the campaign teams, and we pushed it out on all platforms, while doing TV and radio as well.”

As a rallying cry for the campaign, the National Front had coined #FillonGate, a new hashtag devoted to allegations against the candidate. In January, after the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé reported that Fillon had paid his wife Penelope some €900,000 from parliamentary funds, #FillonGate became #PenelopeGate — and quickly rose to the second highest trending topic on Twitter.

“These campaigns rely on preparation, discipline, speed and a huge number of supporters amplifying the message,” added Dussaussaye. “Without them, we would never reach so many people.”

Global nationalism

Vardon’s work was complemented — some would say magnified — by a parallel effort he pointedly doesn’t take credit for. Even as official National Front accounts were turning out tweets under the #LeVraiFillon, an anonymous account with just 900 followers was making waves of its own.

Under the handle “Farid Fillon,” the account’s avatar depicted the candidate wearing an Islamic-style beard and robes, in a gross Photoshop mockup. It posted a blend of anti-Fillon memes, negative news stories and “parody” tweets in which Fillon spoke in a mock North African accent.

Despite its small following, the account sparked angry reactions from conservative politicians, notably from the entourage of Alain Juppé, who had been similarly renamed as “Ali Juppé” on Twitter before he was knocked out of the primary.

Some senior Front members also stepped forward to denounce the account. Le Pen pointedly did not. In an interview with the French television station BFM TV in January, she said that “Anything that is not an insult, defamation, an incitement of hatred, belongs to freedom of expression.”

“It does not come from us, of course,” she was quick to add.

A similar account, “Djamel Macron,” targets Emmanuel Macron, who is running as an independent centrist. And recently, the winner of the Socialist Party primary Benoît Hamon said he was “proud” to have been called “Bilal Hamon."

Le Pen’s own use of social media is conservative. While she has picked up the Donald Trump-ian use of exclamation points, her official Twitter account posts mainly photos of campaign meetings and interview quotes. Emotional outbursts are rare (the one exception being the time she tweeted grisly images of ISIL beheadings to a talk show host who had drawn a parallel between the terrorist group and the National Front). Le Pen’s personal blog, Carnet d'Espérances (“Notebooks of Hope”), doles out a bland mix of policy digests and photographs of her with cats or petting calves in the countryside.

But the Farid Fillon controversy highlighted the National Front’s ability to benefit from a broad base of online freelancers and international supporters, who can add stiff doses of virulence to the party’s messaging, while allowing its candidates to keep their hands clean.

Meme material may be prepared by an American web user using translated material provided by a Front sympathizer in France, or vice versa. It’s then relayed online, often by anonymous accounts following instructions left by others in the forums. The American alt-right’s Pepe the Frog mascot, who stumped for U.S. President Donald Trump, has found new work attacking Fillon as the blonde-coiffed “Pepe Le Pen.”

The National Front’s online supporters include a nebulous group of activists known in France as la “Fachosphère” (named after an investigative book by two French journalists). It includes pro-Le Pen, pro-Russia French blogs like Fdesouche.com and Reinformation.tv, private French citizens and sympathizers in the United States and Russia who meet anonymously on online forums.

“All of a sudden, we see a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, who consider that, ‘OK, now Brexit is done, now Trump is done, we are moving on to France’" — Philippe Vardon

Le Pen herself has connections to powerful and web-savvy foreigners. In 2015, a series of leaked text messages linked her to Konstantin Rykov, a former Kremlin propagandist who discussed a financial reward for her recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Le Pen, who denies any quid pro quo, subsequently obtained a €9 million loan from a Russian-backed bank.)

Maintaining a residence in France, where he tweets pro-Le Pen messages from French and Russian-language accounts, Rykov is known in Russia as a pioneer of social media activism. “There is a very direct connection with one of the key figures of Russian internet,” said Anton Nossik, a prominent Russian blogger. Rykov declined to comment for this article. Gaëtan Bertrand, the coordinator of Le Pen’s web campaign, and other Front officials said the party did not receive any advice or assistance from partners outside of France.

“Unlike other parties, which have accounts only managed by officials... Marine Le Pen has a vast network of support from militants on social media,” said the manager of “Avec Marine,” a Twitter account with 15,400 followers. The 23-year-old professional who asked to remain anonymous said he had “formal and informal” links with National Front cadres but was not employed by the party.

“When we prepare an operation, it’s in cooperation with many accounts,” he said. “We have grouped Twitter conversations where we get organized: what to do, when, what hashtags to put forward, what visuals to create.”

Bertrand acknowledged in emailed answers to questions from POLITICO that the party had ties to such account holders. The web team, he wrote, had “long since” identified the owners of sympathetic accounts, “and we can at times be in contact with them.”

Vardon declined to confirm the Front’s connections to activists abroad. But he did acknowledge the existence of a global “patriotic” front online.

“All of a sudden, we see a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, who consider that, ‘OK, now Brexit is done, now Trump is done, we are moving on to France.’ You can see how central the French election is to their view of the world,” he said.