The threat of Trumpian tragedy looms over France: Allow me to introduce Éric Zemmour, a right-wing media fantasy already sucking up all the oxygen in France’s presidential race before even declaring his candidacy

17 comments

  1. Soft pay-wall, so here you go:

    > The threat of Trumpian tragedy looms over France. Allow me to introduce Éric Zemmour, a right-wing media fantasy already sucking up all the oxygen in France’s presidential race before even declaring his candidacy.
    >
    >
    > For years, Zemmour has been something of a household name, a professional provocateur to whom few paid serious political attention. All of a sudden, he is everywhere, interviewed ad nauseam and ranting about immigration and Islam to all who will listen, which turns out to be a staggeringly large number of people. Sound familiar?
    >
    > There are limits to Trumpian comparisons, a hallmark of liberal American commentators with solipsistic tendencies. But with Zemmour, the parallel does illuminate something profound: the media’s ability to dream up a candidate ideal for “engaging” audiences and then to legitimize the candidate by speaking of hardly anything else.
    >
    > Zemmour, like Trump, always knows exactly what to say to elicit the most outrage and, therefore, attention.
    >
    > He was a columnist for the decorous right-leaning daily Le Figaro, the bestselling author of various books about national “suicide,” and a regular blowhard on C-News, the local version of Fox News. For all the French have claimed of late to oppose American “cultural imperialism,” they seem just fine entertaining the presidential prospects of an entirely unqualified racist buffoon they recognize from television. According to some opinion polls, he could win as much as 45 percent of the vote in a potential second round run-off against President Emmanuel Macron.
    >
    > For the moment, Zemmour is just an idea, not yet a real political force. But what matters is the apparent popularity of the idea he represents, which is an insult to collective intelligence and the dignity of a venerable political tradition.
    >
    > Without question, racism is the essence of his pitch, to the extent that he has one. As he put it in a rally earlier this month: “I think many French people were waiting for this message… that the country is in danger of dying, subverted by an unprecedented wave of migration, that whole areas of the country have become enclaves of foreign Islamists.”
    >
    > Zemmour shares many views with the far-right Le Pens — 93-year-old Jean-Marie and 53-year-old Marine — who carry the stench of Holocaust denial and remain deeply unpalatable to many French voters. He enjoys support from the aging patriarch himself, but is even more extreme in some positions.
    >
    > Unlike Marine Le Pen — who has found herself trailing him in recent polls — he speaks elegantly and presents a veneer of intellectual rigor. The terror of his popularity is that it has reiterated how far-right extremism need only find an aesthetically palatable vessel to be taken seriously.
    >
    > Perhaps the most interesting twist is that Zemmour is Jewish and still deeply invested in historical revisionism, particularly about the Holocaust. He has questioned the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the wrongfully convicted Jewish military captain accused of treason in the 19th Century. He repeatedly defended Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy regime, which helped facilitate the deportation of 76,000 Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. He has also written that the families of those killed in an Islamist terror attack on a Toulouse Jewish school were somehow less French because they chose to bury their relatives in Israel.
    >
    > These claims have outraged the French Jewish community, but Zemmour does not seem to care.
    >
    > His message emotionally resonates with far too many voters, who feel that France’s culture of remembrance has gone too far. “It’s a question of fighting this repentance that kills us,” Zemmour said in a recent interview, “in order to raise up France.”
    >
    > The same emotional pull applies to his racism. Zemmour comes from a family that arrived in France from Algeria, though he was born in the Paris suburbs in the late 1950s. In some ways, he has the classic worldview of the “pied noir,” the Europeans exiled from Algeria who tended to become politically right-wing and deeply resentful of Muslims.
    >
    > Zemmour often styles himself as a national id, the ugly voice of what too many French people — even on the left — feel but cannot quite bring themselves to say. This week, he pressured a Muslim woman to remove her headscarf on national television. “You are not free, Madam,” he said, as he removed his own tie.
    >
    > He has been convicted of hate speech against Muslims and repeatedly told people of African and Arab descent that they should change their foreign-sounding names. Worst of all, Zemmour advocates dangerous far-right ideas that were once considered beyond the realm of respectability. The most pressing example of this is his embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
    >
    > The theory, coined by the French writer Renaud Camus in 2012, maintains that Europe’s white, Christian populations are being actively “replaced” by hordes of Muslim migrants. It has inspired deadly violence all over the world, most notably in the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, when a terrorist killed 51 people.
    >
    > “Today, we live in a de facto colonization from the populations that come from the south of the Mediterranean and who impose — through numbers and, sometimes, with violence — a de facto sharia,” Zemmour told me when I met him in 2018.
    >
    > That the violence carried out in the name of this bogus conspiracy theory has not changed his tune in any demonstrable way says it all. Yes, Zemmour is a media creation and even something of a joke. But as with Trump, the joke is already on us.

  9. I was in France last week and saw his book with his vampire looking ass face on top and I just had to turn it upside down. I couldn’t resist.

  14. I hope he wins, although I certainly wish he was American. We could certainly use a more polished version of Trump.

  16. The only positive of him becoming president ( how unlikely that is) would be to watch and see the EU “acting“if France starts doing stuff that now Poland and Hungary get all punished for. While the same EU ignored corruption and worse from EU countries that atleast tow the political line of the EU.

    Atleast Germany would act consistent, ignoring things as usually.

Leave a Reply