A controversial poll on Muslims in France, conducted by one of the country’s leading survey institutes, was commissioned by a media company linked to an alleged Emirati smear campaign.
The study, published on Tuesday by the French Institute of Public Opinion (Ifop), claims to “establish the state of play of the relationship to Islam and Islamism among Muslims in France”, whose numbers it said rose from 0.5 percent of the population in 1985 to 7 percent in 2025, making Islam “the country’s second largest religion”.
The survey concludes that there is “a phenomenon of ‘re-Islamisation’ that particularly affects younger generations and is accompanied by a worrying increase in adherence to Islamist ideology”.
According to Ifop, the data reveals “an intensification of religious practices, a hardening of positions on issues of gender mixing and a growing sympathy for radical currents of political Islam”.
It states, in particular, that “nearly one in two Muslims (46 percent) believe that Islamic law should be applied in the countries where they live”.
According to Ifop: “This data gives grist to the mill of those who fear that the Muslim population is developing into a ‘counter-society’, that is, seeking to organise its daily life according to religious norms distinct from, or even opposed to, those of the majority society.
“This trend, far from diminishing over time, seems instead to be strengthening generation after generation, driven by a youth increasingly eager to assert its Muslim identity in the face of a French society perceived as hostile.”
Muslims as an ‘internal enemy’
The poll has been widely reported by the French media and political class, particularly in conservative circles, where it was seen as proof of a desire among Muslims to place themselves in opposition to the republic and its laws.
Speaking of “terrifying figures”, far-right politician Marion Marechal Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen, described the possibility that France “will find itself facing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of radical Muslims who will want to implement sharia law”.
On Tuesday evening, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez also appeared to react to the poll, stressing “the urgent need to launch phase three of the government’s action against the entryism of radical Islam”, noting the creation of new legislative tools to combat “political Islam”, including a new offence of “undermining national cohesion”.
“Republican laws will always be superior to religious laws, wherever they come from, whatever they may be, including sharia,” he said, noting the creation of new legislative tools to combat “political Islam”, including a new offence of “undermining national cohesion”.
The survey has, however, been accused of bias, both in its methodology and interpretations, and of paving the way for “Islamophobic” and “alarmist” narratives aimed at “fuelling fear, hatred and division”.
The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, for instance, lamented that Muslim religious practice was being treated as a threat. He denounced “a naive statistic [that] is transformed, through a rhetorical shift, into a discourse of danger”, in which “spirituality” becomes associated with “rigorism, therefore ‘Islamist temptation’, therefore ‘radicalisation'”.
The president of the Observatory Against Islamophobia, Abdallah Zekri, denounced “a tailor-made study to feed TV talk-shows with security-driven thrills, wallow in sensationalism and offer fearmongers prime material”.
Journalist Jean-Pierre Apathie noted that the poll’s interpretation portrays French Muslims as “stateless persons more attached to their own community than to the country they live in”, adding: “That’s what was said about Jews a century ago.”
Several left-wing politicians also spoke out, particularly within France Unbowed (LFI), the party of presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who saw it as an “Islamophobic hoax”.
“Once again, [young Muslims] are being singled out as a kind of internal enemy, as a danger to our country,” said LFI MP Paul Vannier, denouncing “the foul conflation at the heart of this survey”, which “aims to turn millions of our fellow citizens into potential Islamists and terrorists.”
Regarding the methodology, many pointed to the unrepresentative sample size of 1,005 people who identify as “Muslim”.
For example, while only 149 women who wear headscarves were included, Ifop concluded that one in two Muslim women aged 18 to 24 now wear the veil (45 percent), demonstrating a “gender separatism” that “primarily involves making the female body invisible”.
Also criticised were “approximations and shortcuts in the form, the addition of percentages tending to exaggerate certain trends and a lack of clear definitions of the terms used”.
Words such as Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist and “Islamism” were used without being precisely defined for those interviewed.
Despite the conclusions drawn about “sharia”, the pollsters never actually used the word; instead, they referred to “Islamic law”.
To reach the “46 percent” figure of respondents who believe that sharia “must be applied”, the poll combined the 15 percent of Muslims who said Islamic law “must be applied in full” with the 31 percent who said it “should be applied in part and can be adapted to the rules of the country where one lives”.
Alleged Emirati campaigns
Some have pointed the finger at the survey’s sponsor, the magazine Écran de Veille (Screen Watch), which describes itself as a “monthly magazine for resisting fanaticism” and is published by a website called Global Watch Analysis.
The editorial output of these media outlets is almost exclusively focused on denouncing “Islamism” and in particular the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated groups (such as the Palestinian Hamas). Qatar is also regularly targeted.
The two outlets reportedly received funding from Countries Reports Publishing, an apparent shell company registered in the UK that conceals its shareholders’ identities and is linked to other publications hostile to political Islam and to Qatar.
According to French newspaper Liberation, the director of publications, Atmane Tazaghart, as well as many of his contributors, are mentioned in a large-scale case of interference and disinformation that was allegedly orchestrated by the United Arab Emirates in France, via the Swiss intelligence firm Alp Services, and revealed by Mediapart in March 2023.
The campaign’s objective was, in particular, “to influence the press and publish false articles attacking Qatar” as well as movements linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the UAE.
A few months later, the French investigative media also revealed that the UAE was involved in a smear campaign that targeted more than a thousand people and hundreds of organisations from 18 different European countries that had been spied on by Alp Services and were portrayed as having links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The investigations, dubbed the Abu Dhabi Secrets, found that Emirati authorities paid at least €5.7m ($6.5m) for the campaign.
Once information on the identified individuals was gathered by the Swiss group and sent to Emirati intelligence services, agents were able to further target them through press campaigns, forums published about them, the creation of fake profiles, and the modification of Wikipedia pages.
According to Mediapart, around 200 individuals and 120 organisations were also targeted in France, including former Socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon, the LFI party and the National Centre for Scientific Research.
Contacted by Liberation about the poll, Tazaghart denied “any suspicion of foreign interference” and refused to reveal who was behind Countries Reports Publishing, saying the company stopped funding Ecran de Veille in “2022 or 2023” and that it is now self-funding.
Meanwhile, Ifop told Mediapart that “the commissioning body, like any media outlet, participated in choosing the topics, but was not responsible for any of the wording of the questions” and “did not review the final report before publication”.
Middle East Eye contacted the Emirati foreign affairs ministry for comment but had not received a response by the time of publication.
These revelations nevertheless provoked an outcry on the left.
“The operation to stigmatise our Muslim compatriots, orchestrated by Ifop and amplified by Le Pen and the entire French far right, was commissioned by an organisation linked to the Emirati intelligence services,” Vannier wrote on X.
His colleague, Clemence Guette, said: “How long will we allow foreign powers to spread disinformation and turn the French against each other? How can a once-respected polling institute become complicit in this? And how can the media relay such an operation?”
The UAE, which has previously denied being involved in similar campaigns, was again accused of interference in France recently.
On 20 October, the investigative outlet L’Informe reported suspicions of Abu Dhabi’s involvement in a Tracfin investigation into LFI MP Carlos Martens Bilongo. L’Informe said that Tracfin, the French financial intelligence unit that tracks money laundering, produced a note riddled with errors, under pressure from the UAE, whose policies the MP had criticised.
Bilongo reacted by denouncing “a real scandal, against a backdrop of foreign interference” and filed a complaint against persons unknown for “false denunciation” and “collusion with a foreign power”.
