Did Italian newspaper La Repubblica publish an article saying that one of the 2027 French presidential candidates, Édouard Philippe, acquired a villa for 15 million euros? No, that's not true: The newspaper denied it. Lead Stories found no credible sources confirming the claim.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by the @Elissamaiss account on August 20, 2026. The original caption read:
🚨Édouard Philippe a acheté une villa en Sicile pour 15 millions d'euros à son ancienne adjointe au maire du Havre, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, qui l'avait elle-même acquise un an auparavant pour le même montant. Le Havre est-il donc une ville si riche ?
Source : repupplica.com/politica/2026/... #France #EdouardPhillipe #LeHavre
As translated from French to English by DeepL, it said:
🚨Édouard Philippe bought a villa in Sicily for 15 million euros from his former deputy mayor of Le Havre, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, who had herself purchased it a year earlier for the same amount. Is Le Havre really that wealthy of a city?
Source : repupplica.com/politica/2026/... #France #EdouardPhillipe #LeHavre
This is what the image attached to the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @Elissamaiss on X.)
The villa was previously listed for sale for 15 million euros (archived here). As of this writing, however, there was no publicly available information linking Philippe -- the Le Havre mayor, former prime minister and a 2027 presidential candidate (archived here) -- to the property.
The link (archived here) shared in the post in question led to a story that seemed to be a legitimate news article at the first look, but that was not the case: The link misspelled the real outlet's name https://repupplica.com, replacing the double "b" with a double "p", and displayed the wrong domain -- "com" instead of "it."
The real newspaper's website is https://www.repubblica.it.
A very broad search for the French politician's name across it's website (archived here) did not return the article in question. Furthermore, the search showed that La Repubblica had not written about Philippe between July 30 and Aug. 20, 2026, when the article shared in the post reviewed in this fact check went live:
(Image source: La Repubblica.)
Giancarlo Mola, managing editor at La Repubblica daily newspaper, told Lead Stories by phone on August 21, 2026:
La Repubblica never published this article on its website. This is clearly a fake, as can be seen by the URL, repupplica.com. The site has been reported to the competent authorities.
A search across English-language news articles on Google News for the key phrase seen here (archived here) showed zero reports covering the alleged purchase.
Lead Stories translated the same key phrase to French via DeepL and used a VPN to access pages indexed by Google News France, and that produced no matches as well (archived here).
In the same fashion, Lead Stories accessed Google News Italy, and no news reports covering the allegation (archived here) could be located there, either.
