Far-right anti-Islam provocateur Eric Zemmour is running a presidential campaign à la Donald Trump — in theory

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i just watch interviews with him all day basically

France’s Eric Zemmour is running a campaign à la Donald Trump — in theory

The far-right French provocateur is struggling on the political pitch but succeeding in getting attention, similar to the former US president.

www.politico.eu

In his quest for power, Zemmour has one role model: Trump. One friend and conservative ally said Zemmour responds to advice about how to do politics with a simple answer: He is running “a Trumpian campaign.”

Zemmour has even drawn the parallel himself.

Trump, he told French TV channel LCI, “succeeded in uniting the working classes and the patriotic bourgeoisie. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about … for 20 years.”

More directly, Zemmour’s constant provocations, attacks on the media establishment and love of social media are a page taken straight from Trump’s playbook.

Even Zemmour’s somber campaign launch video plays on a key Trumpian theme: nostalgia, according to Christopher Bickerton, a lecturer at Cambridge University.

“Both Trump and Zemmour appeal in an emotional sense to nostalgia,” Bickerton said. “Populists don’t always play on nostalgia, sometimes it’s more a white, exclusive vision. … Zemmour appeals to a certain image of France, much like Trump a certain idea of the U.S. It has a powerful effect.”

The video, which was released on YouTube, has been watched over 2.5 million times.



On the face of it, Eric Zemmour has failed his Trumpian transformation.

Underneath the surface, it might be a bit more complicated.

During his first TV interview as an official French presidential candidate on Tuesday, Zemmour — a former journalist running an insurgent campaign heavy on culture wars and anti-immigrant rhetoric — appeared slight, tense and defensive. There was no fanfare, no alpha-male bravura. And at the end of the prime-time TV slot, he grumbled crossly that he didn’t like the journalist’s questions

More broadly, Zemmour’s presidential campaign launch this week has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

First, there was a finger-flipping episode in Marseille. Then there was the campaign launch video the media could not run because Zemmour’s team didn’t get the TV rights approved. Lastly, there were the allegations that his 28-year-old de facto campaign director was pregnant with his child — Zemmour is married and has campaigned on traditional family values.

As Zemmour has spun from one moment to the next, the French Twittersphere has been alight with debate over whether he is doing some of this on purpose. Is there a method to his madness?

And with Zemmour — as with Trump — people are paying attention, even if it’s just to gawk.

One adviser on the Zemmour campaign team claimed the campaign’s early stages are all part of the “storytelling,” theorizing that “the hero needs to overcome tribulations” to keep the media on its toes. Another admitted plainly that the last couple of days “have been a bit complicated.”

Currently, Zemmour is polling at 13 percent compared to 19 percent for his fellow far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and 24 percent for incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, according to POLITICO’s poll of polls.



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"we have to stop with this anti-fascist theater. even DeGaulle was called a fascist" - Zemmour

 

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interview translated to english!

 

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Éric Zemmour’s Bid For French Presidency Based On Stating The Obvious

For pointing out that French civilization is in serious decline, Zemmour is smeared as a racist. But his message is resonating because it’s true.

thefederalist.com

"For this latter group, Zemmour’s unapologetic bluntness is refreshing in a media environment where it’s considered somehow racist or bigoted to point out what has become undeniable about the state of French civilization. In a video announcing his candidacy, Zemmour gave a rousing defense of French civilization, calling for a radical return to national greatness. “It is no longer time to reform France, but to save it,” he said, and warned his supporters that they would be tarred as racists.

As if on cue, The New York Times published an op-ed Thursday that declared Zemmour “the loudest and most extreme voice of French racism today,” who heralds “a new, more virulent chapter” in the history of French bigotry.

Like America, France is based on a universal ideal: liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is also a true nation, bound together by history, language, and religion.

Zemmour’s straightforward argument, dismissed as racist by woke liberals in both France and America, is that the nation will not survive unless immigrants are required above all to become French, to accept the ideals and ethos of liberté, égalité, fraternité, to adopt the French language and to some extent the French way of life. In other words, Zemmour is arguing that France is not and cannot be multicultural. It must be French, or it will become nothing.

That message is resonating in France because it is basically true. Macron is aware of its purchase, and has been tacking to the right on a range of issues in recent years, from insisting last summer that France would not “erase” its history by removing colonial-era statues, to imposing stricter limits on immigrant visas from North African countries earlier this year.

Le Pen finds herself now in the awkward position of being outflanked on the right after having spent years trying to re-brand her National Rally party as more mainstream than the anti-immigration and actually racist National Front party she inherited from her now-ostracized father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. That effort appears to be backfiring, though, as French voters realize that Le Pen’s anti-European Union socialism won’t, on its own, be enough to save their beloved country.

When Zemmour says both the right and left of France have “led us to this deadly path of decline and decadence,” and says he’s running for president so “our daughters won’t have to wear the Muslim headscarf, so that our sons won’t have to submit,” he is taking aim at France’s entire political establishment. That includes one-time supposed liberal upstarts like Macron as well as nationalist rebels like Le Pen, both of whom have proved to be amenable to establishment politics, which in the view of Zemmour and his supporters is the same as being amenable to French decline.

When Zemmour says he’s running so “the French people remain French, proud of their history and confident of their future,” so that new immigrants assimilate “and make the history of France their own, so that we create new French people in France, instead of foreigners in an unknown land,” that’s not an appeal to racism or bigotry. It’s the most basic appeal a patriot can make: let us, together, preserve our nation and make it prosper.

That this needs to be said at all, at this late hour, says far more about the state of modern France and its elites than it does about the French right or Zemmour. That his campaign will be met with howls of racism from elites on both sides of the Atlantic likewise tells you everything you need to know about what those elites think French national culture — or any national culture — is worth.

 

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Zemmour at packed opening rally: "we have let in 2 million immigrants, the equivalent of the population of Paris. if Macron wins, 2 million more will come in. we need 0 immigration as our political objective"

 

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excerpts from Zemmour's speech:

“They call me racist. But I am the only one not to confuse the defense of one’s own with the hatred of others.” He speaks against racism, while at the same time preserving the French heritage.

“Meanwhile, the feminists avert their eyes, and talk to us about inclusive writing.” [Boos]

“Doubtless that is why I am the only one… to establish without false modesty the obvious link between this immigration from the other side of the Mediterranean and the threats that weigh every day on French women: on their liberty, their on integrity, and even on their lives.”

And it is thanks to her experiences (in Algeria, where Zemmour’s parents originate) that “I was able to understand before others the repression of women taking place in those neighborhoods where mass immigration has brought an islamic civilization that is so cruel to women.”

Next he discusses how the judiciary and the media control acceptable speech, tries to prevent them from defending their ideas. “They want to steal democracy. Don’t let them do it.”

they even thought they had pushed out, far from the city centers and nice neighborhoods. They are wrong. The French people have been here a thousand years, and wish to still be the master of their own home for a thousand years more!”

“If I win this election, it will be the beginning of the reconquest of the most beautiful country in the world.” Here Zemmour introduces his theme of “reconquête”, or reconquest, which is now also the name of his movement or party.

He continues: “15,000 French who have braved political correctness, the threats of the extreme left, and the hatred of the media.” At the mention of the media, the crowd breaks into boos. Are you getting that 2016 feeling? I am.

 

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He must be nothing less than what France has been waiting on for half a century: the man of the nation. Zemmour must incarnate the timeless and immortal body of France

 

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It is not enough to be president of the Republic: He must be king of France. This transubstantiation that we used to call ‘the two bodies of the king’ is a moral necessity, my dear friends. And like any Christian morality, it’s an injunction of love: Zemmour is a matter of love, which must touch every Frenchman in in his heart, in his solitude

 

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from the French media:

“You are nearly fifteen thousand Frenchmen who defied political correctness, the threats of the extreme left, and media hatred; fifteen thousand Frenchmen who don’t keep their heads down and who are determined to change the direction of history,” Zemmour congratulated his supporters. “Because, let’s not be unnecessarily modest — the stakes are immense. If I win this election, it won’t be a political transition like any other, but the beginning of the reconquest of the most beautiful country in the world.”

 

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60 percent say Zemmour is sexist. 48 percent say he will change things. 45 percent say he is courageous. only 21 percent say he is ready to be president

 

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"in 2100 France will be an Islamic Republic if we don't change course!" - Zemmour

 

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Eric Zemmour is a defender of civilization!

 

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"Zemmour is predisposed to be a dictator"