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”.