French far-right commentator Eric Zemmour, a candidate in the 2022 French presidential election, attends a political campaign rally in Villepinte near Paris, France, Dec. 5, 2021.CHRISTIAN HARTMANN/Reuters
A few days before officially declaring himself a candidate for France’s highest office, Éric Zemmour responded in kind to a man in Marseille who had raised his middle finger at him during a precampaign tour of the southern French city.
A photo of Mr. Zemmour flipping the bird at the unidentified passerby naturally went viral. But instead of derailing the far-right politician’s candidacy before it got off the ground, the incident only seemed to energize his supporters in the face of an inevitable pile-on by the French media.
In just a few months, Mr. Zemmour has gone from a thinking man’s version of a right-wing cable news agitator to a serious contender for one of two spots in April’s second-ballot runoff election for the French presidency. His diatribes against Islam and the threat he says it poses to France’s Judeo-Christian identity have earned him unrivalled media coverage. He drums up resentment toward French Muslims of North African origin who dominate the country’s low-income suburbs, known as banlieues. His discourse of French declinism has struck a nerve.
“We will not allow ourselves to be dominated, turned into vassals, conquered, colonized. We will not allow ourselves to be replaced,” Mr. Zemmour said in a 10-minute video launching his candidacy that contrasted images of postwar French icons Jean-Paul Belmondo, Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon with more recent news clips depicting violence in the banlieues.
Along with his candidacy, Mr. Zemmour, the son of Jewish Algerian immigrants to France, announced the creation of a new political party – named Reconquest – in a nod to the medieval Christian reconquering of Muslim Spain. Though he seeks to reclaim the mantle of Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French resistance, he romanticizes Vichy France.
If the odds of Mr. Zemmour actually winning the presidency appear slim to none, his ability to shape the race remains clear. He has already eaten into National Rally leader Marine Le Pen’s support – enough to dislodge her as the favoured candidate to take on incumbent President Emmanuel Macron on the second ballot. Mr. Zemmour and Ms. Le Pen are neck-and-neck in the polls, with the first-ballot support of 14 per cent and 15 per cent of French voters respectively, according to an ELABE survey released Tuesday.
In last weekend’s presidential primary held by France’s main centre-right party, Les Républicains, the candidate who most ressembles Mr. Zemmour, Éric Ciotti, led on the first ballot. Mr. Ciotti lost on the final ballot to Valérie Pécresse, but his surprisingly strong showing has forced Ms. Pécresse, the president of the Île-de-France region that encompasses Paris, to agree to incorporate some of Mr. Ciotti’s hard-line promises into her own platform.
While the ELABE poll showed support for Ms. Pécresse surging to 20 per cent in the first round of the presidential vote, most French pundits expect a close three-way contest between Ms. Pécresse, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Zemmour for second spot on the first ballot. (The top two finishers on the April 10 first ballot will face off in a runoff election on April 24.) Of the three, Ms. Pécresse would appear to be the biggest threat to Mr. Macron on the second round. ELABE showed her narrowly beating him on the second ballot.
Mr. Macron, who has not yet officially declared his candidacy but is considered nearly certain to do so, remains the favourite to top the first ballot, though his support slipped to 23 per cent in the ELABE poll, which had a margin of error of between 1.2 per cent and 3.1 per cent.
Ms. Pécresse, who served as a budget minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy, hopes to lure centre-right voters who supported Mr. Macron and his La République En Marche! party in 2017 back to Les Républicains. But she will face a difficult balancing act if she is to avoid defections from her party to Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Zemmour. Much could depend on whether Mr. Ciotti gets fully behind her candidacy, something he so far has remained coy about.
Ms. Pécresse describes herself as “two-thirds Merkel, one-third Thatcher” and has embraced the nickname dame de faire, or the lady that does, a pun on Margaret Thatcher’s Iron Lady (or dame de fer) moniker. She is the first woman to lead her party, though two French women – Socialist Ségolène Royal in 2007 and Ms. Le Pen in 2017 – have made it to the second ballot.
With Mr. Zemmour setting the tone, however, the presidential campaign now under way promises to be ugliest in the history of the Fifth Republic. It threatens to surprise the world, in the most unpleasant way.
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