Unlike Marine Le Pen, far-Right presidential candidate Zemmour has no link to France’s fascist tradition. His meteoric rise comes from the mainstream
Is Éric Zemmour, the television pundit turned presidential candidate, a fascist? His ideas on immigration, Islam and gender are no doubt extreme. To date, he has been twice convicted of incitement to racial or religious hatred.
Only this November, the 63-year-old went on trial again on similar charges, over a remark made on TV in September 2020 that unaccompanied foreign minors were “thieves and rapists” and that France “must send them back”. The court case is ongoing, with Zemmour’s lawyer claiming the charges are “unfounded”.
His first electoral rally, held in the Parisian suburb of Villepinte earlier this week, was marred by scenes of violence: Zemmour supporters, some of whom belong to far-Right and Neo-Nazi groups, beat up antiracist activists who peacefully demonstrated.
Yet to put the ‘fascist’ tag on Zemmour is lazy and unhelpful: it neither sheds light on the reasons for his meteoric political rise, nor does it explain what this current breakthrough represents for French politics.
Promoted by the media
Zemmour indeed sounds like a fascist and has the ideas of a fascist but unlike his electoral opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party, he has no direct link with the French fascist tradition. He comes from the mainstream of French politics, having spent the past 35 years in conservative journalism. In succession, he worked for newspapers and media such as Le Quotidien de Paris and Le Figaro, family-friendly radio stations such as RTL and had a popular talk-show on France 2, the main state television channel.
Between 2019 and 2021, he was the editor and diarist on a daily show broadcast on CNews, a free-to-air news channel that is under the control of Vincent Bolloré, a media proprietor and business magnate. Bolloré, a staunch traditionalist Catholic, fell out with Emmanuel Macron. The president criticised the businessman for using his media outlets to set a reactionary agenda. Now, hostile to Macron’s re-election, Bolloré is widely seen as promoting far-Right ideas and has established CNews as a kind of French counterpart to Fox News in the US. Bolloré has used Zemmour to push forward his ‘law and order’ and Islamophobic agenda.
Born in Algeria to Algerian Jewish parents and raised on the outskirts of Paris, Zemmour embodies the vacuity of the French media, which has undoubtedly made him a political star. Various mainstream television and radio stations as well as newspapers have given him a platform to exercise his vitriolic style and express his racist ideas. Zemmour has not faced a hostile environment. On the contrary, he is the creature of the French political, media and economic establishment, which has protected him and promoted him over the years.
