Eric Zemmour | AFP
HE IS A HECTOR from hell, hounding his victims with hate-filled abuse. Immigration is his cause célèbre and he enjoys insulting Muslims, Arabs and Africans. Best-selling author and television commentator Eric Zemmour has become a household name. An aggressive nationalist, the far-right Zemmour, 63, is trying to become the next president of France. His campaign slogan is the famous Napoleon quote “Impossible is not French.”
People see Zemmour not as Napoleon’s avatar but as a French Trump. Both compulsively bait “minorities”. Both are rabble-rousing populists, anti-mainstream media, non-politicians who claim to be the “enemy of political correctness”. Like Trump, Zemmour hopes to catapult from small screen to big political stage, promising to lower taxes and to slash immigration. But there are differences. Zemmour is an orator with argumentative skills, while Trump’s polemics never went beyond name calling: “Crooked Hillary”, “Lying Ted”, “Sleepy Joe”.
Zemmour is compared with Brexiteers’ Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson for his Euro-scepticism. To keep migrants out, Zemmour wants to reimpose border controls within the EU.
Zemmour’s main grouse is the “demographic tsunami of Arabs, Africans and Muslims who are violent and incompatible with French society. France is not France because it is full of immigrants. French people have become foreigners in their own country.”
He peddles “Great Replacement”—a controversial theory developed by French philosopher Renaud Camus—that with the complicity of the European liberal elite, immigrant hordes, especially Muslims, are replacing the white, ethnic French. Though popular among supremacists, even far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen shun this theory.
When he cannot find facts, Zemmour conjures them. “Most drug traffickers are blacks and Arabs… unaccompanied migrant children are “robbers”, “murderers” and “rapists”… 90 to 95 per cent of juvenile delinquents are Africans. This is reality.”
But the “real” reality is that France does not maintain ethnicity-based statistics. About French Muslims he says, “In some neighbourhoods, we do not live the French way but the Muslim way. Most women are covered, men wear outfits like the Prophet in the seventh century, they consider you a whore if you wear a miniskirt, they watch young men to see if they drink alcohol. We can no longer call this France.”
Opponents agree that this can no longer be called France if “demons from hell” get away hawking hate and division. How does a xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist become popular in France, a nation that prides itself for its secular, liberal values? The fact is that his anti-immigrant tirade has traction not only with a core base, but the wider population.
Says hairdresser Rene Dubois, “Our old Parisian suburbs have become immigrant ghettos. When I take the bus, I hardly hear anyone speaking French.” Says surgeon Jacques Ohana, “Zemmour has put immigration centre-stage. Whether he’s elected or not, he’s won the campaign.”
If elected president, Zemmour promises the “reconquest of the greatest country in the world”. Like “Replacement”, “Reconquest” is a loaded term, harkening to the medieval 800-years long “Reconquista” period when Christian forces drove out Muslim rulers from southwest Europe’s Iberian peninsula.
Zemmour goes back in centuries not only in restoring national grandeur, but also in his attitude to women as mere objects of carnal desire. Said he, “Before feminism, a young bus driver could slide a lustful hand over a charming female’s behind without her suing him for sexual harassment.” Zemmour fought but failed to prevent the tabloid Closer from exposing his extramarital relationship with his 28-year old adviser Sarah Knafo, with whom he is expecting a child. Closer’s headline snickered “Zemmour to become a daddy in 2022.”
The irony is that Zemmour is the son of immigrants. He is Algerian by descent, his Jewish parents fleeing into France during the 1954-62 Algerian war. For an immigrant to aggressively block other immigrants seems hypocritical. But there is a well-known phenomenon: “Close the door after me”. Zemmour failed twice to get admission into the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the elite alma mater of most French presidents, including Emmanuel Macron. But Zemmour is intellectually sharp. Political analyst Bruno Cautrès says, “He is a good communicator with a passion for oratorical jousting.”
Zemmour began as a print journalist, then graduated to CNews—a right-wing television network a la Fox News—attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers daily. He has been convicted for hate speech and has multiple cases. “My adversaries want my political death, journalists want my social death and jihadists want my death,” he declaimed.
His Islam-immigrant bashing helps him invade the far-right space occupied by another president-hopeful, Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen. Voters seem fatigued with Le Pen, increasingly seen as a poor debater, a repeat loser and too “mainstream” for radicals. But working classes support her, especially the poor, young voters with temporary jobs who feel cheated by globalisation. Zemmour is supported by businessmen, shop-owners and older, bourgeois men who feel French culture and family values are threatened by immigration.
A “Great Rapprochement” between Zemmour and Le Pen would secure them a third of the votes and presidential victory. If not, they split the right-wing vote bank and destroy each other. But rapprochement seems unlikely because they hate each other. Zemmour calls Le Pen pathetic; she calls him arrogant. Precisely because his opponents are divided, analysts expect Macron—still a divisive figure—to win even though he faces a fresh challenge from the centre-right candidate Les Républicains’ Valerie Pécresse. She projects herself as a combination of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel. That seems a contradiction in terms aimed to win votes left, right and centre.
Latest polls show Zemmour is losing steam. Macron has 23 per cent of the vote, Pécresse leapfrogs to 20 per cent, Le Pen 15 per cent and Zemmour 14 per cent. Usually in France, the least hated figure wins. The most rejected candidate loses. A backlash brews—59 per cent of French voters now reject Zemmour. Bombast aside, like Napoleon, Zemmour may yet discover “impossible” can be very French.