Stellantis-Dongfeng EV Deal in Rennes; France Opens Interference Probes

France's two big stories on May 20 sat at opposite ends of the public anxiety register: a major industrial bet on Chinese EV know-how at home, and an open admission that foreign-actor disinformation reached deep into the spring municipal elections.

Stellantis and Dongfeng announced a memorandum of understanding for a 51/49 European joint venture under which Dongfeng's Voyah electric models will be assembled at Stellantis's Rennes plant. The arrangement is explicitly designed to clear the EU's 'Made in Europe' threshold — 70% of an EV's content produced locally — and to side-step the bloc's punitive tariffs on Chinese imports. Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa framed it as leveraging "the best of Stellantis's global footprint alongside Dongfeng's access to China's advanced new energy vehicles ecosystem," while Dongfeng chairperson Qing Yang said the venture would "accelerate Dongfeng's global expansion." The Rennes plant has been operating well below capacity for years and currently produces only a high-end Citroen SUV; Filosa is set to lay out the company's broader strategy at its investors' day in Michigan on Thursday. The deal pairs with a separate earlier-May agreement under which Stellantis will build Jeep and Peugeot models for the Chinese market, and with Tuesday's announcement that the group will begin producing small low-cost EVs for Europe to compete with BYD, Chery, Geely, Leapmotor, Jaecoo and XPeng.

On the security side, two parallel inquiries into foreign interference in the March municipal elections advanced on the same day. Anne-Sophie Dhiver, deputy head of Viginum, told lawmakers the government's anti-disinformation agency had confirmed an Israeli private company ran a campaign targeting pro-Palestinian candidates; Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced legal action over the operation, with French authorities reportedly identifying the Israeli firm BlackCore as the operator. The case is the first time Viginum has publicly attributed an active disinformation push during a French election to a private foreign actor, and the operation specifically targeted La France Insoumise (LFI) candidates. The investigations together raise unresolved questions about diplomatic follow-through and the legal route — whether French law can effectively prosecute the foreign corporate actors that Viginum identifies.

A French parliamentary report on the Lactalis contaminated-formula affair, released on Tuesday and discussed publicly by co-rapporteur MP Mathilde Hignet on Wednesday, found that contaminated infant formula remained on the market for a year. The report apportioned blame across both the state and manufacturers and followed disclosures that Nestlé had also conducted silent recalls of products. The finding adds to the running political file on food-safety governance and the limits of post-crisis recall regimes — a parallel issue to the children's-homes scandal that broke in Britain on the same day, in that both highlight how regulators struggle to keep pace with private-sector actors handling the most vulnerable consumers.

Backdrop on the Russia file: Britain on May 20 issued a General Trade Licence allowing imports of diesel and jet fuel refined from Russian crude in third countries — a step that Paris and several European partners have not followed, and that adds to a London–Paris asymmetry on sanctions enforcement just as Chancellor Friedrich Merz, on the same day in Berlin, restated Berlin's hope that Xi Jinping would press Putin to end the Ukraine war during the Russian president's Beijing visit.