Eric Zemmour is eating Marine Le Pen alive FRANCE
French opinion polls are best taken with a generous bucket of sel de Guérande
but this evening’s drop of a Harris Interactive survey of intentions to
vote in the 2022 presidential election might genuinely be described as
explosive.
This
poll contains the crucial assumption that Xavier Bertrand will emerge
as the candidate of the centre-right Les Républicains, but it
nevertheless suggests that trends are moving in unpredicted directions.
Bertrand is currently only marginally ahead of Eric Zemmour, whose
insurgent campaign from the right is starting to profoundly unsettle the
conventional wisdom.
If
Zemmour, who still hasn’t officially announced his candidacy, continues
to climb and Marine Le Pen to decline, something extraordinary might
happen. Zemmour might even make it into the second round, besting
Bertrand and setting up a contest with Macron that nobody had predicted.
There are 195 days remaining until the first round of voting.
Efforts to cancel and demonise Zemmour are plainly failing. He’s sold
200,000 copies of his new book in a week, even after he was cancelled by
his traditional publisher Albin Michel.
He has been banned from appearing on his own nightly TV show by the
broadcasting regulator, which appears to have invented a new rule just
to silence him. And he’s been physically threatened. Yet he has
practically doubled his support in less than a month, from 7 per cent to
13 per cent.
Zemmour is loathed by the bien pensants
of Paris and condemned as a rabble-rousing rightist, although his
formidable intellect and powerful polemical talents are widely
acknowledged. An unashamed defender of French values against Islamic
ideology, this son of Algerian Jewish exiles has been convicted on
numerous occasions for his attacks on Islam.
He
says immigrants are responsible for up to 1,000 violent crimes a day in
France. A figure denied by Macron’s Interior Ministry.
I
hear that there are now as many as 200 ‘friends’ of Zemmour working for
his shadow campaign and this week they rented extensive office space in
central Paris. Fundraisers are active not just in France, but in
London, Brussels and Geneva.
Marine
Le Pen, who had been presumed the inevitable opponent of president
Emmanuel Macron, is in free fall. During June she was polling as high as
28 per cent. Her support has collapsed to 16 per cent – awful news for
Macron as she was always his preferred opponent. Zemmour is eating her
campaign alive.
Macron,
who has yet to declare officially that he’s a candidate for
re-election, although he’s campaigning the length and breadth of France
dispensing public funds like confetti, is stuck at 23 per cent – an
uncomfortable score should he have to face a more competent opponent
than Le Pen in the second round of voting.
Some
of the more excitable French commentators wonder whether the President
might fail to get to round two. I think this is probably overblown.
Anne
Hidalgo, presumed candidate of the socialist party, is stuck on 7 per
cent, well behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left France Insoumise.
The left is already demanding that she step aside, claiming Mélenchon
could even get to the second round with help from the socialists and
greens. Let me predict that this scenario is wildly improbable.
Where does that leave Macron? His opposition seems atomised. The polls,
especially those based on hypotheses, are of only limited value.
Abstentionism remains arguably the biggest party in France, which makes
all forecasts treacherous. The friends of Zemmour suspect however they
can mobilise hitherto ‘low-propensity voters’. If that’s true, Macron
could find himself with a real challenge from the right.
