France: The far right Zemour is … stumbling

By Costas Raptis

The man who threatened to “liquidate” the entire French political scene, just five months before the presidential election, has recently seen his own rumored candidacy being liquidated. And he responded by formalizing it a few days earlier than expected.

Eric Zemour was the “rising star” who, from the end of the summer onwards, when he began to be included in the polls (although he had neither declared himself a candidate nor had a political party), seemed capable of overturning all pre-election correlations, bypassing the Marin Lepen on the right, but also enticing many of the center-right voters.

But the two days he spent in Marseille, the last of a tour promoting his new book, were marked by a series of bad mantas for him.

On Friday, his walk in the historic center of the city turned into a chase with angry protesters who called him a “racist”. On Saturday, his visit to the fish market was canceled, citing bad weather. But what will mainly haunt him will be his own obscene gesture.

Zemour was photographed while in the middle of his car he was raising his middle finger to a passer-by, who was later claimed to be the first to start this … semantic dialogue.

Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.

In any case, the controversial journalist could not have hoped for a warm welcome from the Marseilles with intense local pride, when he cites multicultural Marseilles as an example of “where France will be in twenty years”, if it “welcomes 400,000 immigrants time “.

At the same time, the 63-year-old TV star is currently surrounded by rumors that the 28-year-old head of his campaign is pregnant with his child. A particularly uncomfortable situation for a married person who also appears as a devotee of traditional family values.

Arrogance

But the so-called “French Trump” is facing bigger problems where the election game is really being played: stockbroker Charles Gav, the first to donate € 300,000 to Zemour’s campaign in September, has already retired. Former President-elect Philippe de Villiers, Jean-Frederic Poisson and Le Pen’s alien niece Marion Marshall-Le Pen have announced that they will not be attending a Zemour rally next Sunday, with the first loneliness “of the candidate, whose poll percentages have now dropped to 12-15%.

Following all this, Zemour released a videotaped message on Tuesday announcing his candidacy for the presidency (although he has not yet secured the required signatures of elected officials), stating, among other things, that he is addressing the French who are “in exile”. in their own country “and that” the issue is no longer to reform France, but to save it “.

Referring to the conspiracy theory of the Great Substitution, the controversial French-Jewish Zemour declared: “We will not let them make us slaves, conquer us, colonize us, replace us.”

All this in the context of a direction that referred to de Gaulle’s historic sermon on June 18, 1940, with Zemour having placed in front of him a microphone of the time. “The microphone belonged to de Gaulle, but the speech was to Petain,” said Socialist spokesman Olivier For.

Lepen, however, has become discouraged. The possibility of the far right splitting the vote, however, frees President Macron from the fear of a showdown with a strong opponent in the latter, but at the same time opens a window of opportunity for the center-right to nominate its own candidate, who has not yet been selected.