“We’re going to swap the little Macron for the Grande Nation!” Shouts Éric Zemmour into the heated room. His supporters cheer and clap, tricolor flags whirl through the air. The first election rally of the right-wing extremist presidential candidate in the exhibition hall in Villepinte near Paris is a strange mixture of a political happening, a folk festival and the tumult of battle. “No to racism” is written on the T-shirts of the activists from SOS Racism, who have merged into the lower ranks. Your peaceful protest will not be tolerated. A horde of young men pounces on them. A cameraman films the beatings. A young woman with curly hair is pulled by the hair and her attacker brutally beats her. Others throw chairs. A television team is insulted and harassed, the bodyguards work up a sweat while they bring the journalists safely out of the room. At the lectern, Zemmour promises to “retake” France.
“They had no business with us,” Zemmour sneered the next day on television about the left-wing activists who had deliberately provoked his supporters. “Truffle dogs of public subsidies” were they and only came so that the media could claim afterwards: “The Zemmour people are so mean and angry!”
Ruthlessness and unleashed resentment are the recipe for success of the 63-year-old presidential candidate, who for a long time worked as an ethnographer of the French decline. In 1981 and 1988, the journalist said he gave his voice to the socialist François Mitterrand. In the paper of the conservative bourgeoisie, “Le Figaro”, he wrote sharp-tongued pieces of opinion against the mainstream.
Even Marine Le Pen rejected his thesis
He became known with his book “The French Suicide”. In it, four years after Thilo Sarrazin’s “Germany is doing away with”, he conjured similar fears of demographic change, foreign infiltration and economic decline. With this bestseller he popularized the idea of a “great exchange”, “le grand remplacement”, which would lead to French people of Christian-Jewish origin being displaced by non-European peoples of the Muslim faith. His spiritual triumph was creeping. Officially, the thesis was frowned upon. Even Marine Le Pen refused to adopt them.
But then came the Islamist terrorist attacks. Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Promenade des Anglais, police officers, Christians at morning prayers, a pastor, a teacher: the blood trail of Islamist terrorism runs through the country. With each death, each injured person, the questions grew louder and bigger. “The fight is going to be tough. Because the enemy comes from within. He went to our schools and grew up in our neighborhoods, ”said the socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls after the Paris attacks in 2015. Right-wing presidential candidate François Fillon competed with the campaign book“ Defeating Islamic Totalitarianism ”. But neither politician succeeded in moving into the Élysée Palace in 2017.
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