Is Éric Zemmour the French Trump?
The populist provocateur speaks to Les Déplorables
A 59-second viral video
has captured the growing dismay of the French political class at the
swift rise of Eric Zemmour in the presidential race. In it, a cyclist
wearing a Tour de France yellow jersey overtakes a succession of fellow
competitors without even pedalling — he is not sitting on the saddle,
but balanced across it, poised, horizontally, like a superhero. He is
tagged “Le Z”, while each racer he flies past is briefly labelled after
one of the other candidates.
Any professional Instagrammer would shudder at the amateurish
unsophistication of the video. But that is the point: Zemmour, 63, a
bestselling author fired by his publishers this summer and a TV
polemicist regularly sued for hate speech by advocacy groups (so far
he’s won more often than he’s lost), reaches the parts of the electorate
others don’t.
Although he still hasn’t formally declared his candidacy, his ramped-up
media presence in recent months finally prompted polling institutes to
include him in their first round voting intentions surveys. In three weeks, Zemmour jumped from 6% to 15%,
ahead of Hard Left three-time candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (9%), Green
primary winner Yannick Jadot (9%) and Socialist Paris Mayor Anne
Hidalgo, who in the same period dropped from 7% to 5%.
But Le Z’s chief victims are all on the Right. He has all but killed
off Marine Le Pen, who has dropped from 28% this summer to 17%. The two
main Centre-Right candidates, Paris Region president Valérie Pécresse
and Xavier Bertrand, both former Sarkozy Cabinet members, are lagging at
12% and 14% respectively, with Michel Barnier, the former Ogre of
Brexit unexpectedly turned sovereignty champion, battling them for the
Républicain nomination at 11%.
All are uninspiring: le Pen has been left seeming incompetent since
her defeat by Macron in 2017; Pécresse and Bertrand are spouting the
same things France has heard a hundred times before; and Barnier is
baffling because the French, unlike the British, mostly don’t know who
he is.
Zemmour, much like other disruptive populist figures, appeals to those
voters (and many no-longer voters) who had despaired of ever finding a
candidate expressing their concerns. He speaks to their fears: the loss
of French identity and rising insecurity caused, he believes, by
unchecked immigration. His books, which have sold in the hundreds of
thousands, compare a rose-tinted past Republic, where teachers were
respected, fathers held solid jobs, families stayed together and
classical culture wasn’t derided as pale and stale.
So far, so Trump — with a touch of Tucker Carlson. A Le Figaro journalist,
Zemmour came to national pre-eminence when he was given his own daily
debating show two years ago by CNEWS, a rolling news TV cable station
which was re-inventing itself as the French Fox News. CNEWS’s ratings
shot up, overtaking its CNN-like rival BFMTV. Le Z’s style, however,
couldn’t be further from Trump’s. “Unlike my rivals, I write all my own
books,” he jokes. He is highly cultured, even if one might argue that
his erudition is preserved in aspic: he quotes 18th-century philosophers and 19th-century historians, with nary a concession to popular topics. (He does like football and the Rolling Stones.)
This fits French particularism: Les Déplorables here rarely
object to cultural literacy, as long as they don’t feel it’s used to
belittle them, Énarque-style. (Emmanuel Macron specialises in such
putdowns.)
“Je comprends rien à ce qu’il raconte, mais il parle drôlement bien,” is
a typical reaction to a Jacques Bainville- and Charles Maurras-quoting
tirade by Le Z. His style and accent are demotic, his sentences are
clear and his opinions trenchant. In a country where columnists, even in
tabloids, prefer weighty circumlocutions to punchlines, this singles
Zemmour out.
In common with Donald Trump, he relishes dropping live grenades in any
debate. His first polemical essay (he’d already written a number of
political biographies, including one of Jacques Chirac), published in
2006, was called Le Premier Sexe, in clear reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex.
It bemoaned the “feminisation” of values, and whenever talking about it
Zemmour never shied from adding fuel to the fire. “How did women enter
the National Assembly and the Senate? Through parity laws that forced
parties to select them. And I need not tell you how they were picked…
They put in friends, wives, mistresses, etc.”
He believes in the “Great Replacement” theory: he described in his Le Figaro column
those areas in Paris where “one feels best, physically, the
disappearance of the French population […] while, coming from the
suburbs, at the end of a long journey from the depths of Africa, an
Arab-Muslim people has replaced the former inhabitants.” He has
continually hammered home his idea that foreign immigrants to France
should give at least one “traditional” French first name to their
children, drawn from the saints’ calendar, helping them to assimilate
better into French society. “Your parents should have called you
Corinne,” he told the television personality Hapsatou Sy, born near
Paris of Senegalese parents.
In this, the Paris-born Éric Justin Léon Zemmour, son of
French-Algerian Jews who had to leave Algeria in the Fifties during the
independence war, harks back to the old French Républicain model of
“assimilation” rather than of “integration”. “I’m a Frenchman of Berber
origin,” he says. His peculiar brand of nostalgia dovetails with the
long-standing history of France as a country of immigration, that, until
recently, seamlessly crafted Frenchmen and women from anyone who wanted
to become French.
This approach proved successful for centuries. So much so that the
character who most defines, fondly, the French foibles, Astérix the
Gaul, was created by the sons of immigrants: René Goscinny, a
Polish-Argentinian Jew, and Albert Uderzo, an Italian builder’s son.
(Another Italian builder’s son, François Cavanna, founded Charlie Hebdo.) This resonates with Zemmour’s audiences, who smart from being hectored by New York Times journalists shrieking that France is a country riven by structural racism.
Zemmour has used his personal story as a shield while positing
particularly contentious theories, such as his idea that Marshall
Pétain, the President of the puppet Vichy régime under German
Occupation, “made a pact with the Devil, allowing the Nazis to deport
foreign Jews in France in order to save French Jews”. This is a known
far-Right trope in a country that carries the complicated trauma of the
Collaboration.
It’s hard not to see here the influence of the old Jean-Marie Le Pen,
Marine’s father and founder of the National Front, now 93, whom Zemmour
used to regularly visit in his Château de Montretout lair just outside
Paris for long, lively discussions. Le Pen, who was fired from his own
party by his daughter, himself joined the Resistance for a few weeks in
1944, aged 18. But he’s specialised in obsessive remarks about the
Holocaust ever since. He is more of a provocateur than a dyed in the
wool anti-Semite (which is not the case of a fringe he emboldened within
his party) and probably helped cultivate Zemmour’s own taste for
scandalous statements.
Le Pen was never forgiven in France for his provocations; hence his
own daughter’s symbolic parricide. But what is interesting about Zemmour
is that, like Donald Trump, his mounting crowd of partisans discount
his verbal excesses as just “Le Z being le Z”. In a country where, for
centuries, strong opinions have had to be coated in supercilious
obfuscation (there’s a reason why, for decades before the advent of the
Internet, the French press was losing money), Zemmour is largely seen as
an unscary shock jock, not a threatening fascist — except among the
chattering classes, whom he enrages. This, of course, serves him.
What he has achieved, though, is in putting the three-I concerns of
his potential voters — immigration, identity and insecurity — at the
centre of the political discourse. Even a character as cautious and grey
as Michel Barnier, in an effort to gain traction for the Centre-Right
nomination, has now demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration to
France, and attacked ECJ rulings as harmful to French sovereignty.
“The debate on immigration only exists in the [Paris] media now, no longer in public opinion,” says the shrewd social geographer Christophe Guilluy,
the man who theorised “La France Périphérique”, the French version of
David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs. Anywheres. This is an area where the
rest of the political class, especially on the Right, usually runs
scared. Their every new statement now pushes for “chosen immigration”,
more means for the police, stricter criminal sentencing. Yet as former
members of previous governments, however, none of the Républicain
candidates seems credible on the subject.
Zemmour seems keen. He has hired a campaign team and rented a 4,000
sq ft campaign HQ less than a kilometre from the Élysée, funded by a
sympathiser financier, Charles Gave. But he’s no professional
politician. This an obvious asset now, that could turn into a flaw in
the heat of a long campaign. If current trends hold, though, and it’s a
big “if”; Zemmour might well get to the second round next year.
While all polls give a clear victory to Emmanuel Macron in the
run-off today, against any candidate, the President’s reasonably high
ratings of 40% last week have now slid to 34%. He is also facing a
winter of discontent, with energy costs skyrocketing. His prime minister
Jean Castex has just announced that the hikes would be deferred until
next May, which utterly coincidentally happens to be after the April
election. Added to which, 2017’s fresh young man in a hurry has now
become the incumbent in a fractious country.
This is all to the disruptor’s favour. Zemmour has suddenly made
France’s tired political race risky again. What if Macron didn’t even
manage to clear the bar of the first round?
