PARIS — The retro choreography was heavy-handed, its intent apparent: Éric Zemmour in a darkish tie, eyes averted from the digital camera, studying into an old school microphone from sheets of paper, identical to Charles de Gaulle in his well-known speech from London on June 18, 1940, when he known as for the liberation of a fallen France.
Mr. Zemmour just isn’t a towering basic, and France just isn’t on its knees. However Mr. Zemmour, the far-right polemicist who this week introduced his run for subsequent yr’s presidential election, understands the ability of provocative imagery. Effrontery and scandal have propelled his outsider candidacy.
His campaign-launching video was a nationalistic name for reborn French glory. From Joan of Arc to the singer Johnny Hallyday, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Brigitte Bardot, from Voltaire to Versailles, from Notre Dame to village church bells, it took viewers on a tour of Mr. Zemmour’s imaginary France.
The France that — within the telling of Mr. Zemmour, a Jewish journalist of North African descent whose household arrived in France 70 years in the past — existed earlier than immigrants, Muslim veils, vandalism and mealy-mouthed elites led the nation to its most up-to-date unusual defeat.
“His catastrophic imaginative and prescient speaks to a deep-rooted French pessimism,” mentioned Pascal Perrineau, a social scientist. “We’re one of the crucial pessimistic international locations on the planet. Mix that with alienation from the political class, inward-looking nationalism, and a defiant French inclination to overturn the desk, and you’ve got the Zemmour phenomenon.”
Whether or not or not Mr. Zemmour can construct out from his present assist — within the 12 to fifteen p.c vary, in accordance with polls — and qualify for the runoff spherical of voting in April is unclear. However a technique or one other, he’ll have an effect on the end result, splitting the far-right share of the vote and so opening up the sphere. Already this man with no occasion has illustrated simply how far France has lurched to the correct.
There can be no Zemmour phenomenon if France weren’t ripe for it, simply as there would have been no President Donald J. Trump if the USA had not been prepared for his nationalist message.
Mr. Zemmour explicitly fashions himself on Mr. Trump. He rose to notoriety via common TV appearances, he laces his apocalyptic message with anti-immigrant slurs, he makes the unsayable sayable, he delights in a macho contempt for ladies, and his slogan would possibly as nicely be “Make France Nice Once more.”
“We’re an ideal nation, an ideal individuals. Our wonderful previous presages our future. Our troopers conquered Europe and the world!” Mr. Zemmour declared this week, earlier than insisting that “we shall be worthy of our ancestors. We won’t enable ourselves to be dominated, became vassals, conquered, colonized. We won’t enable ourselves to get replaced.”
Mr. Zemmour, like Tucker Carlson of Fox Information, is an ardent adherent to the speculation of “the nice alternative,” a phrase typically attributed to a xenophobic French author, Renaud Camus, who mentioned: “The nice alternative may be very easy. You’ve gotten one individuals, and within the area of a technology, you have got a special individuals.” The brand new France, in accordance with Mr. Zemmour, can be the one which has been led to “decline and decadence” by Muslim immigration.
How did France arrive at this state, the place polls recommend at the least 35 p.c of the inhabitants will vote for both Mr. Zemmour or the perennial candidate of the far proper, Marine Le Pen, within the first spherical of voting?
Some elements are shared with the USA — cultural fracture between cities and the hinterland, deindustrialization, racial tensions, rising precariousness within the office — however others are distinctive to France.
Chief amongst them is the place of the second faith of France, Islam. Lots of the thousands and thousands of Muslims in France, as a lot as 10 p.c of the inhabitants, in accordance with estimates, are efficiently built-in, however their story has tended to be overshadowed by quite a few terrorist assaults by radical Islamists.
This has engendered concern, as has the notion that the teachings of Islam could also be onerous to reconcile with a Republic devoted to the notion that training dissolves variations of religion in shared citizenship.
“Immigration equals Islam equals insecurity,” mentioned Hakim El Karoui, a Muslim who’s a senior fellow on the Institut Montaigne. “No politician praises variety any longer.”
Mr. Zemmour’s emergence modifications the presidential election, to be held somewhat over 4 months from now. As a result of Ms. Le Pen, the chief of the Nationwide Rally, who’s making her third try and grow to be president, and Mr. Zemmour, will divide the hard-right-right vote, it might open the best way for a center-right candidate to achieve the second spherical. The proportion of votes wanted to qualify by being one of many prime two candidates within the first spherical shall be decrease.
Valérie Pécresse, a reasonable conservative who heads the Île-de-France regional council and is a former price range minister, gained a runoff occasion vote this weekend to grow to be the candidate of the center-right Republicans. She has described herself as “one-third Thatcher, two-thirds Merkel” and is rising because the potential darkish horse of an election the place the French left appears condemned to irrelevance.
For now, President Emmanuel Macron, occupying an unlimited vacated center floor, seems to be like the favourite. However he can be much less comfy going through Ms. Pécresse in a runoff than an excessive right-wing ideologue.
Mr. Zemmour, in contrast to Ms. Le Pen, has appealed to a number of the center-right via his erudition and tradition, however his problem is now twofold: to persuade the French that he’s not a one-trick pony and to beat the impression that he’s not “presidential.” In different phrases, he has to handle points past immigration, not least formulate one thing resembling an financial plan; and he in all probability wants to chop from his repertoire the form of crude gesture he aimed toward a protester in Marseille final month.
Nonetheless, till now, as with Mr. Trump, each outrage that may have derailed Mr. Zemmour has left him strengthened, or at the least nonetheless standing, and sometimes main the information of the day. An editorial within the center-right day by day Le Figaro famous this week that it was a French author, Honoré de Balzac, who described scandal as “the pedestal of success.”
Mr. Zemmour has known as youngster asylum seekers “thieves, killers and rapists.” He has mentioned “most drug sellers are Black and Arab.” He has prompt France’s collaborationist wartime Vichy authorities saved French Jews. He has equated Jewish youngsters murdered in 2012 with their jihadi terrorist killer as a result of their mother and father selected to bury them exterior France, in Jerusalem.
He has argued that “Islam is incompatible with the French republic” and prompt that mass deportation of immigrants may not be inconceivable. This regardless of the actual fact a whole part of the cemetery at Verdun, the World Struggle I battlefield the place about 300,000 individuals had been killed, is given over to Muslims who gave their lives for France.
He would ban all “non-French names” like Muhammad. He would rescind the 1972 Pleven legislation that made incitement to racial hatred unlawful and has earned him repeated expenses and one conviction.
Mr. Zemmour’s 2006 ebook known as “The First Intercourse,” printed when he was a journalist at Le Figaro newspaper, was a finest vendor. It argued that France had declined due to the lack of male “virility” and the “feminization” of society. In a subsequent finest vendor, “The French Suicide,” printed in 2014, he waxed lyrical concerning the world earlier than feminism when a bus driver may “slide a concupiscent hand” over a lady’s bottom with out risking prosecution.
Married to a lawyer, he’s overtly concerned in a relationship together with his political adviser Sarah Knafo, 28. He has not denied a information report that she is pregnant, though he has sued the journal that printed the article for invasion of privateness, in accordance with his legal professionals. The revelations haven’t brought about a stir in France.
“A whole lot of French individuals don’t care,” mentioned Mr. Perrineau, the social scientist. “They suppose some degree of scandal is the value to be paid for renewing French political life.”
De Gaulle mentioned in his London speech that “the flame of the French resistance should not be extinguished and won’t be extinguished.”
That, in fact, was resistance to a France that had succumbed to the racist, antisemitic ideology of Vichy.