The technocrats of the European Union won’t be able to survive the next French revolution

ISome of Zemmour’s views would be considered seriously radical in Britain. But in France he is a phenomenon

t is a truism of French politics that the public consistently vote for revolution and then balk at the slightest change. They elect candidates who make claims far more grandiose and sweeping than nonfrench politicians would dare. And then, when the same politician makes a tiny adjustment to the retirement age, for instance, the French public come out onto the streets and shortly afterwards turf their revolutionary of choice out of office.

President Macron is proving a fine example. When he rose to prominence in 2016-17, he was the epitome of the outsider-insider candidate. He may have had the right educational background, but he didn’t even have a party, let alone a set of candidates, until he was well on the way to being anointed President of the Republic.

Yet four years on, Macron has been a stable but unremarkable president. The economic and societal problems that France faced before his tenure are as present now as they were then. And as the opportunity to return to the ballot box comes around again in 2022, the French public are once more looking for an available revolutionary to kick the previous one in the traditional indelicate manner.

At this exact point, for the past four decades, the exact same story has played out. That is the ogreish story of the Le Pen family.

In the 1980s, when President Mitterand needed to split the French Right to remain in office, he actually enabled Jean-marie Le Pen to look like a serious candidate for the presidency. Not least by making him part of the television debates and cynically sending Le Pen’s ratings soaring.

It was an artful if disgraceful move. Certainly, part of the French public liked Le Pen’s Vichy-ite talk, but a larger portion on the Right was put off by it and by everything that Jeanmarie stood for. It is the tragedy of the French Right that Le Pen and his family have continued to be a presence in every election since then.

Because each election cycle, the story is the same. The other candidates take into account the Le Pen candidate (nowadays Jean-marie’s less radical daughter Marine) and spend part of their time trying to subsume and imitate certain of their concerns. Then they warn the country of the dangers of going anywhere near the Le Pen dynasty.

Each time, it works. The foreign press gets excited about the prospect of a serious upset in French politics. But the taint of the Le Pens is such that the public will never vote in significant enough numbers to allow one of them into the office of the president.

This time, however, it seems possible that the Le Pen family’s disastrous hold on a portion of the French Right may finally be slipping. An alternative has emerged. The author and commentator Eric Zemmour has not even announced his candidacy yet. But already the polls show that if he does run, he will effectively kill off Marine Le Pen as a serious candidate.

Polls show her support falling by more than 10 per cent in only a few months, while other candidates of the French centre-right languish far behind her. Were Zemmour to run, it looks possible that he could go through to the final round as the candidate to stand off against President Macron. That is assuming that Macron himself manages to make it through. Here, certainly, would be a revolution.

Zemmour himself is not well known to English readers. Some of his views would be considered seriously radical in British politics. But in France he is a phenomenon. The Jewish son of French-algerian parents, he spent most of his career as a respected mainstream writer on politics. Then in the past decade or more, he suddenly became a pariah among everyone except a significant proportion of the French public.

In a string of books, notably Le Suicide Francais (2014), Zemmour has sought to shatter the consensus of the Parisian intellectual and journalistic class. He wrote about subjects that the public cared about deeply, but which were skated around by France’s intellectual elite. Quite something, given that France’s intellectual class is infinitely braver than our own (to the extent that we have one).

French intellectuals and writers have not shied away from the troubling questions of mass immigration, Islamism and more. But it was Zemmour who said many things that the public had not previously dared. He called for halts on immigration, controversially lamented the demographic alteration of the French population, and called for direct measures to counter these changes.

His books have sold in their hundreds of thousands. But the price he paid was among his peers. Only recently he lost his job presenting a popular television show for reasons spuriously invented and applied solely to him. He has frequently been taken to court for “hate speech”. Other journalists call him every predictable name. Yet with each assault Zemmour has not just survived but grown.

Today he is a celebrity in France. Paris Match recently put him on their front cover because of a photo snatched of him in the sea bathing with his attractive young female assistant. It is a scenario unimaginable in Britain. To even approximate it you would have to imagine Mary Beard papped on the front of Hello magazine with a new squeeze, while considering a run for No 10.

So can Zemmour do it? The polls currently suggest that he could. Macron’s ratings have slumped, and though it is likely he will make the final round of the presidential election it is not certain that he will. Meanwhile, other candidates of the French Right are not only lagging in the polls but also have the distinct disadvantage of saying things now that Zemmour said in far stronger terms many years ago.

For instance Michel Barnier, the EU’S former Brexit negotiator, is hoping to be the candidate of the French Right. To make himself viable, he has spent recent months calling for a moratorium on all immigration into France for five years. Why would the public vote for this watered-down Right-wingery?

Until now the answer was “because you have no other choice. It is either this or the Le Pens. And do you really want them?” But now a candidate has come along who says similar things to what Marine Le Pen says, though with much greater flair and knowledge. And for the first time it seems as though the French Right might have a viable candidate to stand before the public next April without the taint of the Le Pen family dynasty.

Will it work? Who knows. Much of the commentariat is getting ahead of itself in France. And by not yet announcing, Zemmour is playing a clever media game of his own. If he did run, he would have to at least consider creating a serious party structure beneath him. Yet that is what Macron did after coming from nowhere before the last election.

All that is certain is that if Zemmour even made it through, it would be a political earthquake. Not just in France but across Europe. The EU has survived in recent decades on a technocratic class that occasionally registers deep public concerns, but does little or nothing to address them.

Zemmour does not follow in that tradition. With his dislike of the European Union, hatred of the status quo and belief that France can reassert itself as a sovereign power, the French public may go to the polls next time with a chance for serious change. Whether they vote for it, or accept it if they do, will of course be another matter entirely.