Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Plan Z: the rise of Éric Zemmour

The fact that Éric Zemmour hasn’t yet declared himself a candidate in next year’s French presidential election is a bit of a joke. A Harris poll last week put him on 17 per cent, ahead of all other rivals to President Emmanuel Macron. And he’s holding rallies across France at which adoring fans in ‘Zemmour 2022’ T-shirts chant: ‘Zemmour! Président!’

He’s still pretending to be a TV personality on a big book promotion tour. But Mr Z is running and everybody knows it. He has a devoted and surprisingly professional campaign behind him, the nucleus of a political party, conceived with a clear mission: to restore la gloire de la France. His new book has the faintly ridiculous title La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France has not said its final word) and has already sold more than 150,000 copies. He’s insanely popular.

The Parisian establishment, and most foreign correspondents in France, are eager to dismiss him as a rabble-rouser and a show-off. He’s called ‘far-right’ and fascist. Stanford University’s Cécile Alduy, whom the Guardian calls ‘an expert on French political semantics’, says that ‘Zemmour uses a very old-fashioned, French far-right discourse… But what is new is the reception and acceptance of this discourse in the public conversation’. What drives the media really crazy is its inability to stop talking about Zemmour.

Like the British Prime Minister, Zemmour has a first-rate mind and is often mistaken for a clown

Bernard-Henri Lévy, another flamboyant public intello, has accused him of being a Jewish anti-Semite. The truth is Zemmour, the son of Algerian immigrants, says lots of things Lévy has said about Islam over the years, just more forcefully. He also says what a lot of French people know to be right: France has failed to assimilate large parts of its Muslim population and that is a problem.

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