The French Trump: could Éric Zemmour beat Emmanuel Macron?

The conventional wisdom in the London press that next year’s French presidential election was already settled – a rerun of 2017, with Emmanuel Macron defeating Marine Le Pen – is beginning to crumble.

The reason is a man – Éric Zemmour — who is unknown in the English-speaking world, except to close followers of French politics. Zemmour, 63, is shooting up the opinion polls. He was on 10 per cent last week, but is now at 13 per cent, according to the latest poll in Figaro. This brings him close to Marine Le Pen on 16 per cent and the leading candidate of the mainstream centre-right, Xavier Bertrand, on 14 per cent. Macron remains steady on 23 per cent for the first round of the presidential election.

Like Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and Donald Trump in 2016, Zemmour has never previously sought elected office. Like Macron he offers a non-party or post-party politics to millions of voters who no longer have confidence that their views are represented in mainstream politics.

Zemmour is above all a journalist: like Trump in America, he is a household name in France, thanks to his television shows, articles and books. He has long been an aggressive right-wing columnist on Figaro, the Daily Telegraph of France. Think, perhaps, of a super-charged Daniel Hannan: fluent, absolutely certain in his beliefs, and contemptuous of anyone who lacks his inner faith in a new vision of his country. For Lord Hannan, as he now is, the overriding belief was the need to replace any relationship with the rest of Europe with a new independent Britain.

Zemmour also has a replacement obsession, but he is not interested in arguments about the EU. His enemy is the presence of more than six million Muslims in France. Their presence signifies a process known in France as le grand remplacement – the rise of a new Muslim population, replacing the white Christian population of France.

In a new book, Zemmour sets out his thesis: “Individualism, born four centuries ago arising from the Renaissance and German Protestantism, is coming to an end. It has transformed our old nations into societies of fearful and selfish individuals, who expect the State to recognise their sensitivity and fragile feelings. On the other hand, Islamic civilisation has gained a foothold on European soil, with its increasingly rich diasporas, which impose their values, their laws, their imaginations, their surnames, in a logic of colonisation. 

“These two historic movements embody two opposing world views. For some the abolition of all rules; for others submission to a vengeful god. One day soon, these world views will collide violently. And probably the rule of Submission (i.e. Islam) will brutally crush that of Freedom. In the meantime, they are allies against the same enemy: the French people, their customs, their history, their State, their civilisation.”

There are plenty of ravings based on this “great replacement” theory, on both sides of the Atlantic. It is popular with the White Supremacists who were part of the bedrock of Donald Trump’s support. But Zemmour is also a star of social media and French private TV chains, who have used him to attract audiences with his vivid language and apocalyptic predictions of Islam taking over France. 

As leader of Ukip and the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage was treated reverentially by the BBC, with endless appearances on Question Time enabling him to increase his vote, taken from both the Tories and Labour. Like Farage, Zemmour is the darling of French TV chiefs, who win audiences with his vivid language about France being submerged by immigrants.

We saw that in Britain more than half a century ago, in the form of Enoch Powell, who predicted the takeover of Britain by African-Caribbean and Asian immigrants. Even Mrs Thatcher played with this theme, when she told the BBC before the 1979 election that Britain was in being danger of being “swamped” by immigrants.

The utilisation of fear of immigrants has been a constant in different forms in western politics for years, not least in Britain. Posters showing refugees from Syria, and suggesting that 76 million Turks were about to enter the EU and thus arrive in the UK, were used to great effect by Vote Leave in the referendum campaign. To be sure, there were many other reasons for the triumph of Brexit, but the constant drum-beat of “taking back control” and shutting frontiers to immigration was a powerful part of the winning campaign.

Zemmour isn’t worried about freedom of movement. He calls for the repatriation of Muslims in France, citing the great transfers of populations in Europe after 1945, when Poles and Czechs insisted on the ethnic cleansing of Silesia and the Sudetenland of German-speaking people who had lived there for centuries.

France has indeed been targeted by militant ideological Islamism, whose terror tactics have led to significant atrocities in France. Far more have been murdered by Islamist killers there than in Britain. The issue continues to loom large in French politics.

Hence all other presidential candidates have to take Zemmour seriously. The fluent hard-Left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who helped split the Socialist Party, has debated with Zemmour. Emmanuel Macron has just announced that France will limit visas for family visits from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, in order to force their governments to accept a swifter return of illegal immigrants who arrive on French soil.

At times Zemmour just seems batty. He calls for a ban of the use of the first name, Mohammed – as common among Muslims as John is for Christians. He also wants to ban a first name like Kevin as it is not sufficiently French.

But the plain fact is, he is now treading on the toes of Marine Le Pen. His real “great replacement” tactic is to replace the tired, boring Marine Le Pen and go into the second round against Emmanuel Macron. Like Donald Trump, he could use television, social media and his unspoken slogan “Make France White Again” to challenge for and even win the presidency.

Two months ago, Éric Zemmour was merely a right-wing newspaper columnist and a shock jock anti-Muslim TV personality. Now the question is whether France is at Peak Zemmour, or if he can go further and cause a real upset.

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