French rightwing candidate mocked after dog joins her party
French politicians have long embraced domestic animals – from Emmanuel Macron’s rescue dog, Nemo, who once peed on a fireplace during an Elysée meeting, to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s hobby of breeding Bengal cats.
But a dog called Douglas from the south of France is causing ridicule for the rightwing presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse.
The dog, which lives in Nice on the Côte d’Azur, was allegedly signed up to vote in the primary race that chose Pécresse as the candidate for Les Républicains, according to an investigation by the daily newspaper Libération. The paper said it had seen confidential party membership lists for the December primary, and among the 148,000 party members signed up for the vote journalists had found names of at least four deceased people and one dog.
“Douglas was a discreet party activist,” wrote Libération. “After paying €30 online in November, he received a membership card and the right to vote in the primary. No one saw him at meetings and he never commented on the campaign on social media – for the very good reason that Douglas is a dog.”
Libération said it had contacted Douglas’s owner, who confirmed that he had signed up the animal with his own contact details “to see if it was possible”.
Pécresse said she knew nothing of the dog’s alleged presence and denied any irregularities in the primary campaign, which she said had been “exemplary” and had never been challenged. She said the paper’s investigation was a “grotesque act of manipulation and destabilisation” and that any primary might have had the odd prank. In a statement, the party denied all the allegations and said it would make a legal complaint against Libération.
But it was too late to stem the tide of dog jokes flooding social media aimed at Pécresse, particularly among the digital campaigners of her rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour.
Zemmour, who has convictions for incitement to racial hatred, is known for both his thunderous speeches about the decline of France and his mocking of his opponents.
His supporters seized on Douglas and soon the hashtag #Douglasgate was trending in France. One Parisian Zemmour supporter posted a video of a recent Pécresse speech in which she told party members, “At last we’re all united”, and superimposed footage of a pack of hunting hounds.
Zemmour himself tweeted that his new Reconquête party was the first to officially allow pets to join as supporters, “but they aren’t allowed to vote”.
Douglas soon had his own Twitter account.
Journalists at the paper Nice-Matin claimed to have hunted down the real Douglas the dog, which had been given a false name by Libération to protect his owner. The paper said that the canine was in fact a Shiba Inu living in Nice named Clovis.
Polls this week have shown Macron ahead in the first-round vote, followed by Le Pen and Zemmour, with Pécresse slipping slightly behind them and the hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon trailing her. The two-round vote takes place on 10 and 24 April.
The QAnon conspiracy myth movement continues to thrive in the US and has even strengthened more than a year after Donald Trump left the White House, according to the largest ever study of its followers.
Some 22% of Americans believe that a “storm” is coming, 18% think violence might be necessary to save the country and 16% hold that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, according to four surveys carried out last year by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) think tank.
Each of these baseless and bizarre views is a core tenet of QAnon, an antisemitic internet conspiracy theory which held that Trump was waging a secret battle against a cabal of pedophiles and its “deep state” collaborators – a “storm” that would sweep them out of power.
Yet despite his election defeat by Joe Biden, major social media platforms banning QAnon activity and the disappearance of its leader, “Q”, the movement has not gone away. If anything, it has strengthened.
“The share of QAnon believers has increased slightly through 2021,” the report by the PRRI states. “In March, 14% of Americans were QAnon believers, compared to 16% in July, 17% in September, and 17% in October.
“The share of QAnon doubters has remained relatively steady (46% in March, 49% in July, 48% in September, and 49% in October), while the share of QAnon rejecters has decreased slightly from 40% in March to 35% in July, 35% in September, and 34% in October.”
These findings are based on 19,399 respondents from four surveys designed and conducted by the PRRI during 2021, using random samples of adults in all 50 states.
Natalie Jackson, research lead, said: “People who are susceptible to believing in these conspiracy theories are found in every demographic. It’s not just restricted to Republicans or the uneducated or those who are in a specific age group. It’s distributed throughout.
“Of course, there are some groups that are more prevalent than others, like there are many more Republicans than Democrats, but we do find that people in every demographic find these wild conspiracies believable.”
Among the discernible patterns, about one in five QAnon believers identify as white evangelical Protestants, and QAnon believers are significantly less likely than all Americans to have college degrees.
Media consumption is the strongest independent predictor of being a QAnon believer. Americans who most trust rightwing news outlets such as the One America News Network and Newsmax are nearly five times more likely than those who most trust mainstream news to be QAnon believers. Those who most trust Fox News are about twice as likely as those who trust mainstream news to be QAnon believers.
They generally have positive views of the Republican party and negative views of Democrats, with 68% agreeing in the October survey that “the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists”.
Some 26% of QAnon believers have a favorable view of Biden while 69% have unfavorable views of him. About 63% have a favorable opinion of Trump but 31% have an unfavorable view of the former president who once claimed that QAnon followers “love our country” and “like me very much”.
Seven in 10 QAnon believers agree with the false statement that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, including just under half who completely agree. These individuals are also most likely to blame leftwing groups such as antifa for the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 (there is no organized antifa organization).
Jackson said: “These are people who believe that their culture is under attack, their way of life is under attack, so a lot of them do align with the Trump philosophies. According to those theories, Trump was supposed to be their leader.
“One of the things that’s somewhat impressive is even with Trump out of power, and the fact that January 6 was not ‘the storm’ that they thought it might be, these beliefs have persisted.”
Around eight in 10 QAnon believers
agree with the statement that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity. More than seven in 10 say the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life, or that the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence.
And 32% of QAnon believers agree with the statement that “the idea of America where most people are not white bothers me”.
In late 2021, about one in 10 Americans (9%) agreed it might be necessary to commit an act of violence to save the country. QAnon believers (17%) and QAnon doubters (11%) were more likely than QAnon rejecters (4%) to share this view.