On the morning of 6 October, shares betting on David Lisnard winning the French presidential election were trading at 13.3 cents on Polymarket — putting the Cannes mayor roughly level with Jean-Luc Mélenchon (13 cents) and not far behind Édouard Philippe (18 cents) or Marine Le Pen (42.5 cents). The problem: Ifop had Lisnard at 3.5% in national polling that same week. The gap between the two numbers has drawn scrutiny from Le Journal du Coin, which combed through more than 10,000 transactions on the platform to work out what was actually moving the price.
The outlet's conclusion is not manipulation in any proven sense, but something closer to a thinly traded market amplified by social media. Polymarket itself has been blocked in France by the gambling regulator ANJ since 16 July, with fines of up to €100,000 threatened for anyone advertising access to the unauthorised site — a block Polymarket is contesting, having announced a legal challenge on 21 August. Yet the site logged 205,057 French visitors in June alone, and French accounts kept trading the Lisnard contract throughout.
A market built on small change
The numbers behind the headline price are modest. Between 6 and 13 September, Lisnard's odds nearly tripled, from around 3 cents (with a dip to 1.4 cents) to over 8 cents, on net purchases of just $12,400. Ninety-seven accounts traded across $60,000 of volume that week, but five accounts accounted for 68% of the buying, and half of all buyers staked less than $15. The page now shows a cumulative volume of $3.89 million in shares, but Journal du Coin estimates only around $1 million in real money has changed hands since February.
Social media did the rest. A parodic X account declared Lisnard \"the 3rd candidate most likely to be elected\" on 5 September. Les Mileistes Français posted that the odds \"explodes\" on 10 September, a message that drew 97,000 views and pushed volume from $2,200 to $20,800 in a day. On 25 September, Cyril Hanouna made a running joke of Lisnard's odds on W9's \"Tout beau, tout n9uf,\" quipping: \"My slogan for him is: 100% of French people who know him want to vote for him!\" — amplified further by 21 News two days later. By 4 October, Les Mileistes Français was telling followers \"nothing is more reliable than this,\" a post that reached nearly 500,000 views and coincided with a record $203,000 in volume traded by 137 wallets that day.
Buyers, large and small
Between 2 and 6 October, 182 accounts staked a combined $75,600 on Lisnard, half of them betting under $40 apiece, and 145 of the 182 had never touched the contract before. Three accounts — Sieghart14, resuildde and LaQuica6 — put in roughly $31,000 between 3 and 5 October, about 40% of the total. Sieghart14, registered in October 2026, made its first move on 3 October at 13:52, buying in three tranches of $2,490, $3,456 and $9,009 to accumulate 162,613 shares at roughly 9 cents each, a $14,955 outlay including fees. Smaller accounts such as Capico and ispiceTra traded in single-digit dollar amounts in September, while on the other side of the book, LlamaLoco0000 — registered since July 2022 with 428 bets to its name — staked $430,000 against Lisnard and $228,000 against Le Pen. Accounts neutralwave23 and Thibaud each committed roughly $10,000.
Contrary to a brief 17% spike reported elsewhere, Journal du Coin's minute-by-minute price series shows the contract never exceeded 14%. Lisnard himself weighed in on X at 23:37 on 5 October — \"Don't waste any more time trying to convince me: I'm going to vote for myself\" — as #ilsepassequelquechose trended the next morning. He later told reporters, \"I don't even know how it works!\" On Kalshi, by contrast, his contract traded around 12%, with only about $3,400 exchanged since August, including one $2,000 order and a single $108 trade on 10 September — numbers too thin to draw any firm conclusion either way.
