Fig 11. Reconfiguration of political communities at the time of Penelopegate.

Penelopegate arrived at a time when Fillon’s following was weakening as a consequence of a controversy surrounding the investiture for parliamentary elections, which was badly received by Sarkozy supporters. Some of these individuals had already started to move away from the Les Républicains community, as early as January 23, 2017, and had formed a separate community throughout the full duration of this controversy. Various revelations made by the Canard Enchaîné led to major movements of activists between different communities, with the communities supporting Juppé (a potential alternative, i.e. a “plan B”, for Fillon’s candidacy) and Sarkozy being progressively reinforced. On March 1st, the day when Fillon was summoned in the context of his investigation, a large proportion of Sarkozy supporters were in support of Juppé’s return, in a final attempt to push Fillon to resign, which was revealed by an unusual flow of accounts from the Sarkozy community towards that of Juppé. The public gathering that took place on March 5th at the Trocadéro Square (Paris) brought an end to the perspectives of Plan B. Although the Fillon community gained a large number of new activists following this takeover, some of the Sarkozy and Juppé followers kept their distance, and finally joined, respectively, Dupont-Aignan and Macron. Sarkozy himself withdrew for several weeks, which led to his absence from most of the Fillon communities between January 16th and April 10th. It was only from April 7th, that he actively gave his renewed support to Fillon’s candidacy, as was for example mentioned in the Parisien headline on that day “Presidential elections: Sarkozy (finally) supports Fillon”, and could be seen by his constant presence within the Fillon community starting on April 10th 2017. As can be seen, the bifurcations observed in the Politoscope take place at the same time, or in some cases even anticipate comments in the press concerning the activity of political communities. Each vertical bar corresponds to a political community on Twitter, labelled with the accounts of candidates who were active in the community. The bar’s height is proportional to the number of Twitter accounts belonging to this community. These are computed every Monday.