France: The Trumpish pundit who could be president
France’s next presidential election was supposed to be a rerun of the 2017 race, said Paraic O’Brien in the Irish Independent (Ireland), with the far right’s Marine Le Pen facing incumbent Emmanuel Macron in the final round in April. Then along came Éric Zemmour, “and now no one has a clue what will happen.” The 63-year-old author, journalist, and TV commentator “has outflanked Le Pen on the radical right” and is now polling second only to Macron—even though “he hasn’t actually announced his candidacy yet.” Zemmour’s fame was “turbocharged” in 2019 when he became a prime-time pundit on CNews, France’s answer to Fox News, earning that network multiple fines for “inciting racial hatred” after he called migrants rapists and murderers on air. He is currently crisscrossing France on a book tour for his latest best-seller, France Has Not Said Its Last Word. This polemic’s premise is a modified version of the Great Replacement theory: that “the French way of life is under existential siege” from the country’s 5 million Muslim residents and from political correctness. Zemmour’s solution is to expel at least 2 million Muslim foreigners and return power to the people. To the cheering, well-heeled crowds that come to see him, “he’s more cultural guru than politician, a French Trump.”
A descendant of Berber Jews from Algeria, Zemmour has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, said Abel Mestre and Ivanne Trippenbach in Le Monde (France). He believes France’s half-million Jews must be French first, and in his new book, he condemns the families of three Jewish children murdered by an
Islamist terrorist in Toulouse in 2012 for acting like “foreigners,” because they buried their little ones in Israel. He not only defends the Vichy government of wartime France that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers but even declares that Alfred Dreyfus—the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and later pardoned—may well have been a traitor. Of Muslims, he explains “that he wishes to impose on ‘the Islamic religion exactly the same thing France imposed on the Jews,’” that is, treating them as French individuals, not as a group.
Zemmour is often “lazily labeled a racist,” said Jonathan Miller in The Spectator (U.K.). But he is actually closer to a Margaret Thatcher figure, a true cultural conservative who considers leftist ideology enfeebling and wants men to be men. He argues that the Left has taken over state TV and radio and uses them to promote a woke agenda of white guilt and gay and transgender rights. He wants to, essentially, “make France great again” by focusing on core French values and nationalism, and he promises to put major issues before the people in referendums, including on whether to place French law above that of the European Union. Still, Zemmour will struggle to repeat Donald Trump’s outsider electoral success, said Gilles Paris in Le Monde. He has yet to expand his base beyond the middle class to the working class—he talks little of protectionism and economic fairness—and he will not face an opponent as flawed as Hillary Clinton. Zemmour may force a runoff, but he is, for now, unlikely to beat Macron.