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

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Coulter blames everything on immigrants, Trump blames the Chinese, and Zemmour the Muslims!

 

[whitehall]

Somebody named Clea Caulcutt thinks a Frenchie candidate is operating a campaign like our own former President and the left thinks this is profound. Ho hum.

 

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Zemmour: i want immigration at zero

 

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we waited for Macron to talk about France. he talked about himself

 

[Esdraelon]

You people, for all of your arrogance about being more intelligent or enlightened, missed that bit in history where radical political movements CREATE other radical movements in return. Action/reaction. Traditionalists, patriots, are sick to F**king death of the unbridled bullshit social changes being forced on us and we are standing up. Scream, cry, yell, none of it is going to work because you forgot the primary ingredient for power. COMPROMISE. When you decided you didn't have to do that any longer, we were watching. What comes from now on is on you.

 

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Zemmour: they say i'm exclusionary against Muslims and immigrants, well i say the MeToo movement wants to cancel all white men

 

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Zemmour: i'm not a rapper who said we should kill all whites, i simply came to the conclusion that immigration is bad through my analysis

 

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"Zemmour was the 1st to call me after Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones died. he has a passion for music, a passion for soccer"

"there would be no transexual children under a Zemmour administration"

 

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Éric Zemmour Is Another Right-Wing Fake Populist Created by Corporate Media

Far-right pundit Éric Zemmour says he is running for the French presidency in order to stand up to elites. Yet far from a grassroots endeavor, his campaign has been driven by some of France’s biggest corporate media.

jacobinmag.com

“There’s no such thing as moderate Muslims,” he often remarks. According to Zemmour, a good French Muslim is one who renounces his or her faith. “We have to give them the choice between Islam and France,” he said on TV show C à vous in September 2016. In his oft-repeated view, Islam is incompatible with France’s republican values.

Born into a family that moved to metropolitan France from Algeria, Zemmour has become a mouthpiece for all those who nostalgically yearn for the lost grandeur of imperial France, the colonial France that still, to this day, often unconsciously permeates the imagination of many French people. This France sees the rise of the Muslim faith in France as a “reverse colonization,” as Zemmour explicitly describes it — a notion that resonates with all those still haunted by the ghosts of the Algerian War.

 

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In the Zemmourian universe, provocation is to be embraced — like Trump, there is a certain glee in crossing the line and seeing where the dust settles, over and over

But who can blame him for applying a formula that works? A polemicist-turned–TV personality who understands the inner workings of the press perhaps better than any other candidate, Zemmour has effectively stolen the spotlight from his rivals. Against this backdrop, he’s built impressive support from conservatives and RN supporters put off by Le Pen’s relative moderation.

 

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WE'RE GONNA WIN!

 

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some folks say there's a new axis of evil: "Trump-Putin-Zemmour"

 

[Auld Phart]

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.

On Sunday, Zemmour will hold his first campaign rally in Paris, with over 15,000 supporters expected, according to one campaign adviser. It will be his first speech as a politician, and opponents are hoping it could burst the Zemmour bubble.

“There’s something animalistic in politics, you have to project power,” said a close adviser to Le Pen. “Zemmour looks puny behind a lectern.”

The adviser said Zemmour is trying to ape another famous French anti-immigrant, law-and-order politician: Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.

“He is trying to copy Jean-Marie Le Pen, but Le Pen was an orator who could hold thousands spellbound, they could cry and laugh, he really held them,” the adviser argued.

Then there are practical reasons why it might be difficult for Zemmour to simply roll out a Trump strategy in France.

“Strategically, [Zemmour’s] campaign can’t work, because there are two rounds and the extremists, the eccentrics are always eliminated,” said the same Le Pen adviser. “The system is built this way.”

That is, however, similar to a mantra Trump’s critics preached during the 2016 American election — that the reality TV star’s pugilistic stances could perhaps break through in the Republican primary but would never be broadly appealing enough for a general election. They were wrong.

Another challenge for Zemmour is that he is campaigning alone, without the backing of an established party with funds and networks across France. Trump similarly got by initially with a small cast of political neophytes and cast-offs while nearly every Republican official refused to endorse him.

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my bad...i'll do better next time

 

[OKTexas]

some folks say there's a new axis of evil: "Trump-Putin-Zemmour"

Damn you're pathetic, you made 33 of 35 posts in a thread that's in the wrong forum. Who's paying you to post this crap?

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[basquebromance]

Damn you're pathetic, you made 33 of 35 posts in a thread that's in the wrong forum. Who's paying you to post this crap?

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Soros

 

[basquebromance]

Damn you're pathetic, you made 33 of 35 posts in a thread that's in the wrong forum. Who's paying you to post this crap?

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pathetic? Young, humble, hungry & putting God 1st. I can’t lose