The Elysee candidate argues that the white population is being replaced by immigrants
Ultra journalist and essayist Éric Zemmour officially announced his candidacy for the French presidential elections in April 2022, after months of suspense over whether or not he was going to run for office.
«My dear compatriots, like you, I have decided to take charge of our destiny. This is not the time to reform France, but to save it. I have decided to run for the presidential elections, “the far-right candidate announced in a 10-minute video posted on Twitter in which he asked the French for their vote.
When announcing his candidacy, Zemmour spoke with nostalgia of a France that in his eyes no longer exists and in which many French feel “foreigners” in their own country.
Zemmour explains in the video that he has decided to stand for election due to the inability of French politicians to “save the country from the tragic fate that awaits it.” According to him, both politicians on the left and on the right have “lied” to the French and led France on “that dire road of decline and decay.” “Macron, who presented himself as a new man, was actually the synthesis of his two predecessors in worse”, in the eyes of the debater.
Supremacist
The far-right candidate alluded in his speech to the supremacist and racist theory of the “great replacement”, a conspiracy theory that maintains that the white population is being replaced by immigrants. “We will not allow ourselves to be replaced,” he assured. Although immigration “is not the source of all our problems, it exacerbates them,” according to the debater.
The video of the announcement of his candidacy surprised by its form. Zemmour does not address the French directly in the video by looking at the camera, as other candidates often do. He is shown reading his speech, sitting slightly to the side behind a desk in a library with a huge radio microphone in the foreground. In the background, the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 plays.
The staging chosen by Zemmour was reminiscent of that of the famous speech that General Charles de Gaulle gave on the BBC on June 18, 1940, in which he called from London for the resistance of the French people against Nazi Germany.
Before making the leap into politics, Zemmour worked as a journalist for the daily Le Figaro and the CNews television network, the French Fox News. He has also written books of essays such as “The French Suicide” and “French Destiny”, which have been hugely successful. Zemmour has used the promotion of his latest book, entitled “France Has Not Said Its Last Word”, as a platform to launch his candidacy for the presidential elections.
Two convictions
Zemmour, who has already been convicted twice for incitement to racial hatred, has interrupted the pre-election campaign like a political whirlwind. He has made rivers of ink flow before even officially announcing his candidacy. He has raised controversy with his outbursts and his xenophobic statements against Muslims. Next to him the far-right Marine Le Pen seems moderate.
This weekend caused a new controversy for having made a comb in Marseille (southern France) to a protester who had done it before him. “An inelegant gesture,” Zemmour acknowledged the next day, after being criticized by his political opponents, who described the gesture as “not very presidential.”
The ultra candidate is currently third in voting intention polls for the first round of the presidential elections, behind Macron and Le Pen. His first campaign rally will be this Sunday at the Le Zénith concert hall in Paris. Demonstrations against him are already scheduled that day.
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