Far-right Eric Zemmour is a cunning populist but he won’t beat Macron
It is the evening of April 25, 2022 and Éric Zemmour, the newly-elected President of France, addresses the nation from his gilded desk in the Élysée Palace.
He looks a little startled, as well he might. There is a gleam in his eye and just a hint of sweat on his brow. It is as if, at the age of 64, he has finally realised the enormity of what he has achieved and the extraordinary nature of the agenda he is about to announce.
He glances round the room, draws a breath, and begins to speak. “Mesdames, Messieurs, citizens of France: not just a new day, but a new era has begun for the Republic. Things in our country will never be the same again.”
And then it all pours out: France’s frontiers are to be sealed and guarded; there will be an end to third World immigration, especially from Muslim countries; laïcité (the separation of Church and State) will be strictly enforced; France will withdraw from Nato’s integrated command structure, coupled with a reaching out to Russia and a distancing from America. There will be a crackdown on crime, especially in the banlieues; the police and others in positions of authority, including teachers, will be given the powers they need to restore order. The “diktat” of Brussels will be ended, permitting the recovery of large elements of national sovereignty. Most of all, there will be a restoration of respect for individuals of education and standing (most of them men) who, with the new President’s support, will re-establish traditional values at the heart of French civilisation.
At the conclusion of his hour-long address, watched by more than 90 per cent of the adult population, there is a moment of silence, followed by raucous cheers from the new President’s supporters and a howl of rage from his detractors. It seems impossible – unbelievable. How did it come to this? How could such a thing have happened?
The answer, of course, is that it couldn’t, and it won’t. Éric Zemmour is not going to be the next French President. He will make a lot of noise. His campaign will be filled with sound and fury. He will be a disruptive, dissonant force all the way to the night of April 10, when voting ends in round one of the election. But when the ballots are counted, Zemmour’s name will not go forward to the run-off two-weeks later, which will instead be contested by Emmanuel Macron on behalf of what these days represents the status quo and either the contender for the centre-right Conservatives or (less likely) the old warhorse herself, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally.
What is clear is that the upstart will leave no stone unturned in his search for France’s deepest instincts. In a video speech on Tuesday in which he finally announced his candidacy (as open a secret as in in recent years), he was shown against a backdrop of De Gaulle, Joan of Arc and Napoleon, with a supporting role ascribed to the safely dead movie star Jean-Paul Belmondo. If nothing else, Zemmour has chutzpah.
How far such histrionics will take him is another matter.
On April 26, the final result of the elections will be disclosed. Will Macron be permitted a second term in which, hopefully post-Covid, he is at last free to pursue his goal of modernising the economy, or will one of his opponents replace him in France’s equivalent of the Oval Office? Those who imagine themselves to be in the know say that the incumbent, still standing after five years of misfortunes made worse by his stiff, unbending personality, will come out on top, bloodied but unbowed. Alternatively, having stolen the choicest cuts at the heart of Zemmour’s recipe for national revival, one of the neo-conservatives, Xavier Bertrand or (wait for it!) Michel Barnier, could yet be tasked with leading the country out of the pandemic and into what they would have us believe are the sunlit uplands.
But morning again in France? I doubt it.
The appeal of Zemmour is precisely the reason why the next five years will be extremely difficult – almost impossible – for whoever takes charge. Like Nigel Farage during the referendum campaign and Donald Trump every day since he declared he was running for office, the candidate known as “Z” has unfailingly identified the issues that most concern ordinary voters.
In no particular order, these are immigration, islamist terrorism, Covid, stagnant wages, street crime, failing schools and, above all else, a sense that with each passing year De Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” is no longer about the future but a lament for the past.
Zemmour, whose cunning and eruptive ambition are made more dangerous by his acute intelligence, says what others on the right would like to say, but don’t, fearing that they will slapped down as barbarians.
Where others harbour dreams of a strong, Christian France, with a powerful army and world-beating corporations, in which citizens of black and Muslim origin know their place and paysans in their villages live a buccolic existence, Zemmour comes right out with it. He doesn’t like Muslims. He has no time for them. He isn’t just against illegal immigrants, he doesn’t think there should be a legal track either. Nor is he confident that assimilation – though desirable – can ever work.
When it was revealed that some of the gunmen who slaughtered close to 400 innocent Parisians in attacks in November, 2015 came from the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, he said that the French Air Force should bomb Molenbeek. As far as he is concerned, Muslims are in France for one reason and one reason only: to replace the white population and establish Islamic domination.
On the economy, he is all over the place. He would raise the retirement age to 64 but cut social charges (which pay for healthcare and pensions) from 9 per cent of earnings to 2.5 per cent. To help compensate for the inevitable loss of state income, he would deny benefits to immigrants. Employers, he has said, should have the right to deny work to “Arabs and blacks”.
He loves cars. A climate- change sceptic, he would keep the price of diesel low and restore the speed limit on country roads from 80 to 90 kph. He is against free trade and would introduce import controls on products he believes the French should be making for themselves. He doesn’t like the EU but seems to have accepted that it cannot be wished away, merely, as far as possible, ignored. As for the single currency, he has in the past denounced it as the prmary cause of Europe’s decline, but these days largely leaves it out of the conversation, recognising perhaps that the cure of dismantling it would be worse than the disease.
On Tuesday, in confirming his candidacy, he gave an indication of what the EU could expect should he ever take his seat on the European Çouncil. “Of course we must regain our sovereignty,” he said – “abandoned to the technocrats and European judges who, in the name of the dream of a Europe that will never be a nation, have stripped the French people of their ability to decide their fate.”
In Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners will have shuddered as they heard these words. But they will also have reckoned more surely on Macron keeping his place on the Council. It is one thing, Farage-like, to heap abuse on Europe, something else to expect the voters of France to walk away from 64 years of post-war history.
When he loses next April, it will, however, be Zemmour’s stance on women and feminism that will be most obviously to blame. He can’t help himself. He believes that the primacy of men is part of the natural order of things and that men, as sexual predators, are bound sometimes to descend into violence. In the same way, he regards homosexuality as an aberration that in the twenty-first century is indulged by advertisers keen to exploit a new market. He opposes same-sex marriage and is scornful of transgender claims.
Zemmour’s foreign policy would be determined by two fervently-held principles. He is for Russia and against America. He admires Vladimir Putin, whose attempts to restore Russian greatness and territory he views as entirely natural. On the other hand, while admiring the instincts of Donald Trump, he regards the wholesale adoption of American culture and values as the key to an understanding of France’s twenty-first century decline. Himself a Jew, of North African origin (and therefore an immigrant), he supports Israel and offers no hope to the people of Palestine, who he says long ago lost the battle for statehood and must accept the consequences.
But he is not afraid to take on the Jewish establishment either. When admonished by the leader of the half-million-strong French Jewish community for adopting an especially harsh line on Islam, he responded, “The chief rabbi of France wants to bring my scalp to Macron. He’s just a court Jew”.
But you get the picture. Zemmour is like one of those newapaper columnists on the far right who in preaching to the choir imagine that they are expressing the true feelings of the majority of the public. It was Macron’s overnight emergence as a plausible, and ultimately triumphant, candidate for the presidency that inspired him to exchange mere opinion for the joy of the bully pulpit, albeit as a populist whose interpretation of the centre is everybody who agrees with him.
The son of an Algerian ambulance driver who was often absent from the family home, he says that it was the strong influence of the women in his childhood that taught him “to be a man”. He was a good student, winning a place at the Institute d’Études Politique de Paris, but was miffed when twice denied a place at the École Nationale d’Administration, France’s pre-eminent finishing school for the ruling class. He gained his revenge in 2006 when, as an established essayist and pundit for Le Figaro and a regular talking head on national tv, he was invited to join ENA’s admissions council, withholding his vote, one imagines, from at least some of those whose privileged background he didn’t share.
In 2019, he got his big break when he was recruited by the Fox News clone CNews to be one of their nightly panelists, becoming almost overnight one of the nation’s most quoted and controversial influencers. If he had an inflated ego before 2019, he was soon in total thrall to himself and his judgments, which he threw out, smirking and scmiling, across the entire range of political and social opinion, embracing his duel fame and notoriety as no less than his worth.
Now that he has broken cover and announced his plan to become the most powerful of Europe’s elected leaders, his behaviour will come under intense scrutiny and it is unlikely the process will work to his benefit. Catholic voters are not impressed by the fact that, in his sixties, he has left his wife for a 28-year-old political adviser, said to be pregnant with his child. It is one thing in France to have a mistress, but to abandon your wife and flaunt her successor (as Zemmour has done) is not seen as the action of a gentleman. Not that Zemmour gives a fig for conventions. Just this week, in Marseille, he offered an American-style middle finger to a woman who stood up to him in public, adding for good measure that he wished the finger “to go very deep”.
Already, opinion polls are revealing that the public which much enjoyed him as a maverick outsider are markedly less enthusastic about the prospect of him as President. Marine Le Pen’s numbers are steadying while all eyes are turning to a gathering this weekend at which the centre-right Republicains, after months of faffing about, will at last select their candidate for the Élysée. Both Xavier Bertrand, the bull-nosed head of the Hauts-de-France region, centred on Calais, and Michel Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator now born again as a champion of France First, have shamelessly borrowed from Zemmour and toughened up their stance on immigration and sovereignty.
Will this patriotic stiffening be enough to see off both Zemmour and Le Pen in round one and Macron in the decider? Who knows? Voters are wilfully unpredictable and fickle these days. They can jump from extreme left to far-right at the drop of a hat, dragging the centre in their wake. But my money is firmly on the centre-right option (Macron) against the right of centre option (Bertrand or Barnier). The alternative is just too awful to contemplate, which, if nothing else, should make the upcoming campaign the most fraught and entertaining in years.