Macron Might Be Favored in the French Election, But Keep a Weather Eye Out for Eric Zemmour — a Lot Can Happen

Will Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent left of center president of France, be reelected for five years? If opinion polls are to be believed, yes, though a lot can yet happen, including a surprise from the astonishing right-winger, Eric Zemmour.France’s electoral system may look familiar to Americans. In the United States, candidates are nominated in party primaries and then there’s the presidential election proper. In France, there are two rounds of ballots: anyone endorsed by 500 elected officials can run in the first round, scheduled for April 10. The second and decisive round, on April 24, is restricted to the two first round frontrunners.So far, Monsieur Macron is expected to lead the first round with 23 percent or 24 percent of the vote, and the second with — depending on his adversary — between 54 percent and 64 percent. According to a Harris poll released Wednesday, the hard right leader Marine Le Pen would be the president’s strongest adversary, carrying 46 percent of the vote in the second ballot, whereas Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the French Jeremy Corbyn, would be the weakest, with but 36 percent.Still, a lot of things can happen in the course of five months. One factor is whether a convincing classic conservative, right of center, candidate might emerge in the first round between M. Macron and Madame Le Pen. The French conservative party — Les Républicains — still carries much weight: it is the main opposition group at the National Assembly, and it controls the five richest and most populated regions of France.Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Greater Paris region, and Eric Ciotti, a veteran politician from Nice, were selected Thursday in an internal party vote. A final vote will be held tomorrow. If the conservative candidate eventually overpasses Le Pen in the first round, there will be a tight second round.That’s because left of center Macron and right of center conservatives share a global moderate constituency: Just as M. Macron attracted parts of the LR vote in the last election in 2017, some Macron voters may switch to the conservatives in 2022.A second unknown factor is whether the right-wing outsider Eric Zemmour, who declared his candidacy earlier this week, can endure. For about six months, throughout summer and fall, Monsieur Zemmour, a columnist for Le Figaro, a debater honed by years of radio and television talk-shows, and the author of several best-selling essays, dominated the campaign.Basically, M. Zemmour dwelt on the issues with which the mainstream parties had for years been unwilling or unable to cope and which Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) had picked up. These issues include the negative impact of mass non-European immigration, the challenge of radical Islam, the cost of globalization, and the defense of France’s national identity and sovereignty.Mr. Zemmour recrafted them in such an effective manner that, by mid-October, he had risen to 18 percent of the voting intentions and there were talks of a Zemmourist takeover attempt on both the National Rally and the most conservative wing of LR. All of a sudden, L’union des droites — a unfulfilled 40 year old dream (or fantasy) of bringing together the far right, the classic right, and the right of center — seemed to be at hand.Monsieur Zemmour, though, seems now to be receding to — at the moment — less than 15 percent. His campaign could unravel as quickly as it had grown. In some ways, he himself is to be blamed. Some 77 percent of the French, according to an Elabe/BFM TV poll released on December 1, view him as “arrogant.”The video by which he declared his candidacy can hardly dispell such an impression. For ten minutes, against the same musical background as Tom Hooper’s “Kings’s Speech” (Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony), he lectures the nation about its fate and claims to be its latter days savior, as the charismatic heir of Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and even Charles de Gaulle.A further problem lurks. Since Mme. Le Pen took over the National Front in 2011, she has been eager to distance it from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extremism and to shear it from neo-Fascist or anti-Semitic undertones. Yet M. Zemmour has happily done the opposite. His successive books on France — “Le Suicide français,” “Destin français,” and “La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot” — may be read in part as a brilliant assessment of the current crisis.However, they can also be understood as a recycling of far right ideologies, from the neo-royalist doxa of Charles Maurras to Catholic fundamentalism. Such tricks endeared him to the many National Front sympathizers that did not support Marine Le Pen’s aggiornamento, but repelled many other potential voters.M. Zemmour’s drift to the far right was compounded by his awkward — or even bizarre — stand on Jewish issues. On the one hand, he is the most traditional Jew ever to have entered French politics. Until college, he was educated only at Jewish schools, and he raised a somehow observant Jewish family.On the other hand, M. Zemmour disclaims many of the political attitudes associated with Judaism: not just human rights liberalism, but Holocaust awareness, Zionism, and pro-American conservatism as well. This led him to controversial, or even at times scandalous, statements on the Dreyfus case, the Vichy regime’s handling of French Jews during World War II, or even the right of the Sandler family, as French Jews, to bury in Jerusalem their children murdered by a jihadist terrorist in 2012.Whether M. Zemmour did this tactically, to strengthen his image as a French patriot, or out of deeply held convictions remains to be seen. In the meantime, many conservative French Jews — and French Jewry is quite politically conservative nowadays — are ready to vote for him no matter what, even if many of the right-wing gentiles who like his books may be unprepared for a Jewish president.Finally, one must consider the wider angle: who has been supporting M. Zemmour so far, and why ? The fact is that he enjoyed until recently, as a right-wing intellectual, unprecedented access to the press. Yet this is now being withdrawn from him. Does it mean that he has been manipulated by higher powers? He has certainly been a game changer in many areas. Once the job is done, he may be disposed of.Or perhaps M. Zemmour can rebound. In the aforementioned candidacy video, he names the enemy: M. Macron, of course; the LR leaders except Éric Ciotti; and the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo. Madam Le Pen is spared, understandably. So, though, is the pro-immigration left-winger, Jean-Luc Mélanchon. Mr. Zemmour’s trump card may be, accordingly, not to run as the champion of L’union des droites, but rather as the leader of a global revolutionary assault, from right to left, on the established order.________Mr. Gurfinkiel is a contributing editor of The New York Sun. Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.

Macron Might Be Favored in the French Election, But Keep a Weather Eye Out for Eric Zemmour — a Lot Can Happen

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