The Vulgar Charm of the Bourgeoisie

At the end of September, leaders from Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans concerned about family values, with a few guests from elsewhere, gathered at a demographic summit in Budapest. Also present in Budapest was the notorious French columnist and wannabe president Éric Zemmour. His credentials regarding devotion to family values were revealed on the cover of the French weekly Paris Match just before the summit began, with a photograph of Éric in the sea embracing his “very close adviser” Sarah Knafo, who is neither Zemmour’s wife nor the mother of his three children. Personally, I believe consenting adults can do whatever they like with each other and with themselves, even climb drainpipes, but it is hypocritical to hand out moral lessons on family and Christian values while doing so and to advocate political ideas that have very little in common with those values.

Éric Zemmour is no unknown in France. Even before revealing his presidential ambitions, not yet officially confirmed, he was first a journalist and then a columnist at the Paris daily Le Figaro, a political commentator on television; he has also written several books and earned two court convictions for racism and hatred of Muslims. His latest book, published this year under the title France Has Not Said Its Last Word, with which he launched his march on the Élysée Palace, sold more than a hundred thousand copies in four days.

He was born in France in 1958 to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Algeria a few years earlier. Although he attended the local synagogue in his youth, after his father’s death he, as he puts it, assimilated. His very close associate from the cover of Paris Match, herself also of Jewish origin, cited precisely his distancing from Jewish identity and community as the reason for his appeal. What is more, the projection of France as a country of white Christians, or rather Catholics, is the foundation and ever-present thread of his political ideology. To Zemmour it is perfectly clear who threatens such a France most. Black people and Muslims. And the bogeyman of the “great replacement,” which also so excites the Slovenian far right. In 2016 he declared that all Muslims support jihad and that young people from immigrant families would have to choose between France and Islam. If they choose wrongly, they can pack their bags. Or have them packed for them. For this he earned his second conviction for racial hatred.

He later added to this thought by declaring that France is in an ethno-religious war and faces a gangrene of savages determined to exterminate the white, heterosexual, Catholic man. Besides Arabs, Black people and homosexuals, Éric is also greatly irritated by the judiciary and the media. They are counterweights that are becoming stronger than the government and must therefore have their toes trodden on, he growled recently at a gathering of his ideological crony, the mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, who in 1985—oh, the irony—was among the founders of Reporters Without Borders. What this treading on toes might look like in practice, Zemmour illustrated last week at the Paris security equipment fair, where he grabbed an automatic rifle and pointed it at the journalists following him. Bang, bang, bang. Ha, ha, ha.

Opinion polls today, six months before the first round of the presidential election, show that such ideas have considerable support in France. With around seventeen percent, Zemmour is breathing down Marine Le Pen’s neck and threatening her place in the second round. For now, he has more support than any representative of the traditional conservatives from the Republicans, who have not yet agreed on who will carry their colors. Above all, he is well ahead of all the candidates from the left of the political spectrum, which is even more thoroughly fragmented.

At first sight, Zemmour’s arrival on the political scene benefits President Emmanuel Macron most, who will be seeking a second term. Whereas a month ago he was level with Marine Le Pen, today he stands alone at a relatively high twenty-five percent, roughly where he was at the same point before the last election, while his main rival so far has lost more than a third of her support. But Macron’s lead may also melt away. On the one hand, if we add up Zemmour, Le Pen and the Republicans, plus various radical sovereigntist village eccentrics, the right has almost half the potential votes, if not more. Any consolidation around the most successful candidate of the right, although of course it will be neither automatic nor complete, could endanger Macron’s victory in the second round. Moreover, Macron will probably have great difficulty collecting votes from the left in the second round, since his French version of the doctrine of “neither left nor right, but forward” has disappointed and infuriated many left-wing voters, so many predict that in a second round between Macron and a candidate of the right they simply won’t go to the polls.

The effect of Zemmour’s arrival on the political scene is already being felt among the possible Republican candidates. Even Michel Barnier, until recently Brussels’ Brexit negotiator and an ardent supporter of the EU, recently declared that on migration he opposes the primacy of European law over national law. Very important above all will be how the duel between Zemmour and Le Pen plays out. The leader of the National Rally has for some time been working on a (relative) deradicalization of her party and on appealing to more centrist voters. It was precisely this that created the opportunity Zemmour is exploiting to the full. But there is another difference between them that may in the end tip the scales in favor of the more experienced Marine Le Pen. Although at first sight there seem to be few differences between their political programs, except that on every point Zemmour is a boat length more radical and intolerant, a more detailed analysis shows that they do not address exactly the same part of the electorate. The National Front, dressed up as the “more moderate” National Rally, has strengthened its position in recent decades mainly by taking the votes of a proletariat and lower middle class disappointed with the left. Zemmour, who comes across as a British Euroskeptic Nigel Farage who went to good schools, addresses above all the elite or, as he calls it, the patriotic bourgeoisie. The very conservative, Catholic and privileged part of the French white middle and upper class, which is traditionally sovereigntist, bristling at Europe and frightened of social and demographic changes in which it sees a threat to its privileged position. It mobilizes en masse on issues related to LGBT rights and the right to abortion. In the past, it was to some extent sympathetic to Sarkozy’s flirting with more extreme themes, and after his rather inglorious departure from the political scene some of it moved to Le Pen, although many probably resent being in the same sack as the plebs. No wonder they grabbed Zemmour like a dog grabs a sausage.

A link between Zemmour and Sarkozy, still influential in his party, who publicly rejects Zemmour, is also Sarkozy’s former chief ideologue and the architect of his opening to the far right, Henri Guaino. The gentleman, who is in court these very days over the illegal financing of Sarkozy’s second presidential campaign, was also the first political mentor of Zemmour’s aforementioned very close adviser, who also runs his presidential campaign. Although Zemmour tries to appeal to the lower middle class too, an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the yellow vests is not going very well for him. This was seen most recently during the dizzying recent rise in energy prices, when Le Pen called for protection of the most vulnerable, while Zemmour made it clear that he did not intend to deal with such things, since his mission is to defend France (not the French). In his political paradigm there is not much room for “ordinary” citizens. Clearly this is the ground on which Le Pen will look for a counterattack. In his first televised debate with the leader of the left-wing France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Zemmour also showed that he quickly runs out of breadth and depth. Whether the subject is health, the weather or petrol prices, by the second sentence he will start talking about Islam and immigrants. What will come of all this is not yet entirely clear. Although the centrist Macron will most likely win a second term in the spring, ideas that were roundly defeated in the recent German elections have a better chance on the western bank of the Rhine of becoming part of the political mainstream.