The Economist explains
Who is Eric Zemmour, France’s wannabe Donald Trump?
The populist, anti-immigrant provocateur is outflanking Marine Le Pen
UNTIL THIS summer, Eric Zemmour was just a well-known provocateur who penned reactionary weekly columns in the right-wing French press and railed against immigration and political correctness on a 24-hour television news channel. Nobody took him seriously as an aspirant politician. But in recent polls the 63-year-old Mr Zemmour has surged from nowhere. The front-runner for next April’s two-round French presidential election is still President Emmanuel Macron. But Mr Zemmour is now neck-and-neck with the hard-right Marine Le Pen for a place in the second round (see chart). This has propelled the former TV pundit from an attention-seeking rabble rouser to the centre of political attention.
With no filter and no party, Mr Zemmour trades on two pet themes. He has developed these in various books over the past 15 years, most recently in “France Hasn’t Said its Final Word”. One theme is a lament for the collapse of authority, identity, virility and traditional families in the face of feminism, the consumer society, liberalism, “gender indecision”, and other imported “American” ills. The other is what Mr Zemmour terms the “Islamisation” of French society, and the reverse conquest through immigration of a “2,000-year-old Christian land”. In 2018 he was convicted of incitement to racial discrimination.
Born in the Paris region, Mr Zemmour is himself of Jewish-Algerian descent. Yet, in an attempt to tap into a deep hard-right nationalist strain, he also defends Vichy France for “protecting” French Jews, on the bizarre grounds that it deported foreign Jews first. Adept at such distortions of history, Mr Zemmour wraps his tirades in a narrative of nostalgia, decline and loss. He brings in ample references to Joan of Arc, Louis XlV, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. “Never in our history has our nation been in such peril”, he told a recent rally: “It is threatened with extinction.”
Mr Zemmour is partly set on outflanking Ms Le Pen, by making her look too soft. He says things that the current leader of the National Rally (formerly the National Front) no longer does, in her bid to shed the party’s anti-Semitic and racist baggage. Mr Zemmour declares that Islam is “incompatible” with France, and that French Muslims should be given “French” first names. To broaden his appeal beyond the far right, he also targets a different voting base. Ms Le Pen campaigns partly among blue-collar workers in ex-industrial regions of northern and eastern France, who formerly voted for the Socialist and Communist left. Mr Zemmour courts the ultra-conservative, well-heeled, Catholic end of the Republicans party: those who fret about immigration, campaigned against gay marriage and believe in traditional family values. A quarter of his support comes from those who voted for the Republicans’ François Fillon, the mainstream centre-right candidate, at the presidential election in 2017.
No poll has yet suggested that Mr Zemmour could win the presidency. But Mr Zemmour watched carefully how in 2017 Mr Macron used the Fifth Republic constitution to bypass France’ s established political parties and take the highest office. Mr Macron founded his own party, En Marche!, to support his presidential campaign and win a majority in the National Assembly. Mr Zemmour is also a close student of victorious populists and nationalist strongmen, from Donald Trump to Victor Orban. The TV personality knows how to stir fear, make complicated things sound simple, and mix erudition with populist style. He recently posed at a trade fair cradling a machine gun. Mr Zemmour has already had an outsized influence on the French election campaign.
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