Éric Zemmour and the end of the West | The far-right candidate in France

“The civil war has already started” repeated Éric Zemmour day after day in France. Until a few months ago, he was a journalist and essayist who had gained notoriety as a guest and columnist on major television channels. Now, although he has not yet officially announced his candidacy, two electoral polls present him as third or second in the presidential race at the Elysee Palace in May 2022, alongside Marine Le Pen, traditional candidate of the extreme right, and below the current president, Emmanuel Macron.

Zemmour speaks without filter in a country where political correctness is often the norm. She takes advantage of the space left by Marine Le Pen who worked for years to be correct, to demonize as they say in France, to be presidential, to shake up the image of her father Jean Marie Le Pen and her former left. partners, openly anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, colonialist. So, as far-right forces developed in neighboring countries with upheaval and disinhibitions, their force chose a different path, which seemed to bear fruit until the poor results of the regional elections last June.

The new character has opted for the frontal strategy. He did not do it in the form, where he presents himself as an intellectual, a writer who knows the history of France and its culture. The escalation occurs in the content: Zemmour picks up on old ideas brought up to date at this time of crisis. One of them is that “Western civilization” and “Islamic civilization” would be incompatible, and the second would be in a process of “colonization” of the first by immigration. This process, he says, is the one that would give rise to the “great replacement” of the population, a thesis developed by the writer Renaud Camus. Thus, he affirms, directly: “the French people are replaced by another people”.

“The French elites have committed for 40 years the criminal madness of making and letting millions of immigrants come from an Arab-Muslim civilization hostile to the Christian civilization from which we have come for a thousand years”, he repeats in their interventions. His security discourse takes on another dimension: “the crime we are experiencing is not delinquency, it is jihad, it is a war that they are waging against us, a war of civilization, of plunder, of robbery, of rape, murder ”. An obsession, as he himself admits: “it’s about civilization,” he says.

It’s not just about racism based on skin color and class. Zemmour goes further, takes up the original civilizational thesis of the French far right, that which supported the current of Jean Marie Le Pen, who had voluntarily enlisted to go and fight in Algeria when the National Liberation Front led the fight for the independence finally occurred in 1962. This war always returns: the Algerian government recently called its ambassador in France to consult him on the declarations of Macron who, among others, criticized the “official history” built by Algeria concerning the colonization and war. Macron, who can be one thing, the other, or, on the contrary, seeks the votes on the right.

Immigration is at the center of Zemmour’s entire discourse. In economics, for example, he explains that one of the causes of what he calls the “third globalization of France” with an “obese welfare state” would be that it has gone from “national solidarity to a system of solidarity. universal, we opened hospitals, social security to the whole world. ”His proposal oscillates between internal liberalism, external protectionism opposed to globalization – he accuses Macron of wanting to“ dissolve France in Europe and Africa ”- with the closure of borders and migratory flows. Geopolitically, he argues that it is necessary to leave NATO so as not to continue to “submit” to the United States, and to make a rapprochement with Russia, by removing economic sanctions current.

The far right manages to focus the debate where it grows, becomes polarized, increases fears, anxieties, catastrophic horizons, and avoids delving into economic issues, where it manages to show less force. Its enemy, unlike Latin America, Spain, and partly the United States, is not communism, socialism, cultural Marxism or populism: the French left did not rule. nor presented a strong alternative for decades – with the exception of Jean Luc Mélenchon. last elections – and the Socialist Party, under the government of François Hollande between 2012 and 2017, he ended up adopting the neoliberal agenda and even historic ideas of the extreme right, such as withdrawing French nationality from those who have dual nationality and “attacked the fundamental interests of the nation”.

This year, Mélenchon, who affirms that Zemmour is “a danger for France”, appears fifth or sixth in the polls, close to the candidate of the Greens, Yannick Jadot, above the Socialist Party with the figure of the current mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. First Macron, second or third Zemmour and Le Pen, and fourth the right-wing Republican Party – which obtained its last presidency with Nicolas Sarkozy recently sentenced to one year in prison – which will elect its candidate in December.

It is an arc strongly moved to the right, after a Macron mandate marked by large mobilizations, such as that of the yellow vests, and by the pandemic and the various quarantines put in place. The elections are still seven months away and some polls also indicate a high percentage of abstention reaching 48%, recalling the saying that the first party in France is abstention. Although surprises and twists and turns cannot be ruled out, the map, for the moment, takes, according to pollsters, the form announced for some time: a second round between Macron and one of the right-wing forces, repeating itself , perhaps, the scenario of 2017.

Zemmour is part of the current trend of growth of these new / old rights. In this case, an emergency more to the right than the existing one, like VOX in the Popular Party or Javier Milei in Ensemble pour le changer, in a strategy of competition and alliance. It is likely that its gravitation, supported by the great media impulse, will operate as a pull towards a greater right of Macron, Marine Le Pen and the future candidate of the Republicans. Similar to the VOX effect on the People’s Party with renewed anti-communist and pro-colonial flags, or Milei on Juntos, now crusading to end severance pay.