Often cast as a controversialist, the French Donald Trump, and the most prominent far-right journalist in France, Éric Zemmour has announced his run for France presidential elections in April 2022. Recent polls suggest that he could attract about 12 % of the first-round votes, challenging Marine Le Pen for the far-right's leadership. He has no party and no election experience but asserts that politics is one of his dearest passions. His radical ideas and bestseller books inspire many who believe France is in great danger of death.
Born on August 31st 1958 in a Jewish Algerian family, Zemmour is a journalist, intellectual, and author whose ideas fervently extol western culture and the enlightened tradition, tokens of modernity. He thoroughly opposes post-modernism and post-Marxism, claiming these currents have initiated a tyranny of political correctness allied with a “Cancel Culture”. By the same token, Zemmour denounces feminism as a mere selfish movement of women concerned with their own happiness at the expense of their families. Zemmour insists that divorce and abortion in western law spurred the dismantlement of the traditional family and father figure. The defacement of such traditional tenets incited the current "feminization of society" and, at a macro level, represented the victory of emotion over reason. Perhaps the greatest hindrance to modernity, according to this thinker, is multiculturalism. “An unusual alliance has been made”, he insists, between post-modernists, post-Marxists, and feminists (which Zemmour accepts to combine socio-economic egalitarianism and libertarianism), with Islam. This alliance is completely illogical to the Algerian thinker who sees in Islamic culture the lack of recognition of individuality. In a conspirator tone, Zemmour affirms these ideas took over university, the media, politics, and have spread all over France. They are allegedly changing history, “less Robespierre in History books, more Olympe de Gouges; Napoleon is getting cancelled over futile arguments regarding his stance on slavery; they destroyed Colbert because of ‘Code Noir’”.
Politically speaking, Zemmour considers immigration as the biggest threat to France. One of the author’s most far-fetched ideas is that the immigrant does not intend to assimilate or integrate. Instead, Zemmour claims with all certainty, Islamic radical groups want to take control of the country and destroy French culture and identity. “The French culture is fading away as well as the French civilization”, says Zemmour. As a solution to end this presumed "race war", Zemmour advocates stopping immigration and removing all the possibilities for an immigrant to bring other immigrants. Furthermore, France should cease social benefits for foreigners and limit them to the French, ban all Muslim names, and put an end to the jus soli, according to which every child born in France is French even if the parents are not. In other words, Zemmour intends to redefine what it means to be French and assert who can and cannot be considered French.
It comes as no surprise that Zemmour also expresses his aversion to what he terms as lobbies that interfere negatively with French authorities: the Jewish lobby, whose statal financial support compromises the national interest; Black History, which is allegedly ‘forcing’ the entitlement of its culture and unsettling national tradition; and the gay lobby, that has turned sex into an identity: what before was merely lurking behind the scenes is now becoming an exhibition of gay love (which Zemmour, unsurprisingly, regards as inferior to the love between a man and a woman). In terms of political economy, Zemmour is an anti-globalist, anti-EU, who believes in a protectionist trade strategy.
Over the years, Zemmour's visibility has been increasing with radical and extremist stances that do not recognize dignity and equality for all but solely for those living in tune with a "sacred" tradition. The same way the eighteenth-century enlightened thought challenged superstition, authority, tradition, and became the modern western culture that Zemmour is so fond of, nowadays society is going through inevitable transformations, and resisting them is creating a new ideological conflict that seems to irrepressibly prevail in the global political sphere. Although this presidential candidate does not seem to stand a chance against Emmanuel Macron in a hypothetical second-round runoff, Zemmour is, undoubtedly, gaining more ground and followers, challenging the usual far-right leadership of Marine Le Pen, and reshaping the landscape of French politics.
Sources:
Caballero, Diego Martín Velázquez, “From a Simple an Unhappy Identity to The French Suicide: Alain Finkielkraut Neo-reactionary thinking and Eric Zemmour”, Nueva Época 45, (October 2018 - March 2019), pp. 52-72.
Very good Article.