In Pleurtuit near Saint-Malo (Brittany), Eric Zemmour, possible presidential candidate, holds a conference, Friday, October 29. Or rather a meeting. The room is packed: 700 seats with chairs added to the sides and an entrance ticket of 10 euros collected by the organizing association for the protection of heritage. Obviously, at this price, we only find conquered people who claim : “Eric president, Eric president!”, at the start of this meeting “cultural”. “This is not a rally or a political meeting, it is a cultural conference! “, specifies the organizer at the opening of the “conference”. Obviously, he is the only one who does not understand that we are indeed here in a campaign rally. According to the Ipsos-Sopra Steria survey for franceinfo and The Parisian-Today in France published on October 1, Eric Zemmour is credited with 15% of the voting intentions in the first round of the presidential election.
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Moreover, the participants in the “cultural conference ” come to see the candidate and not the writer. Some have Eric Zemmour’s latest book under their arm, but they are much less numerous than at the start of the tour. The audience is quite varied. With large features, middle class, a small majority of men, rather old. Some came as a family like Gabrielle and her husband Mohamed, son of harkis, in his fifties, both nursing executives at the hospital. Their choice is made: 2022, it will be Zemmour. And yet … “I voted Macron in both rounds in 2017. I am a juppeist, at the base”, Mohammed confides. “I did not vote for Emmanuel Macron. I voted against Marine Le Pen”, specifies Gabrielle, she who now intends to vote for Eric Zemmour in 2022: “Because in four years, the situation has deteriorated.”
Immigration, insecurity, education keep coming back to the participants and one feeling almost always dominates: urgency. They realized it, they say, by watching Eric Zemmour in his shows on CNews. His daily television appearances are therefore also one of the keys to his success. It is even a springboard.
All the participants we met, without exception, discovered or got to know him better thanks to his program. This is the case of Thierry, in his sixties, accompanying disabled children. “I’ve been following him for almost a year now, I’ve listened to him a lot on CNews. I also discovered his writings. So it’s been quite a while anyway, well before he climbed in the polls. “. He is Sarkozy 2012, Le Pen 2017, but the candidate National Rally (RN) will not have her voice next April. “Zemmour’s speech is clearer, he identifies the migration problem more clearly, Judge Thierry. He is not in the half measure. “
“In my opinion, it is time to put an end to massive immigration and I also think that he has a more ambitious political project for France than Marine Le Pen.”
According to an Ipsos survey, a third of the potential voters of Eric Zemmour voted RN so far. Former activists are present. Luc, for example, in his early sixties, leather jacket, nostalgic for the FN “historic canal”. “I do not find myself in the RN compared to the FN that I knew several years ago, underlines Luc. I am not an unconditional support of Eric Zemmour but I find myself in certain ideas close to Jean-Marie Le Pen. “
All prefer to close their eyes to excesses. Here, we appreciate the radicalism of the polemicist but it embarrasses, too. The words of Eric Zemmour on the children of the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse murdered by Mohamed Merah – from “foreigners above all and wanting to remain so beyond death” because they were buried in Israel, he writes in his last book – have something to disturb Dominic: “It is not said, things like that …. that children are not French because they are being buried elsewhere. But maybe we should go deeper into things when he talks about things like that.”
As for the statements of Eric Zemmour on Philippe Pétain, who would have “protected French Jews”, Sylvain, a finance student, and his mother get away from it. “It bothers me. You can’t deny that after 1942, Pétain didn’t save anyone. But that’s part of the character, that arrogant and provocative side.” “If we stop at this kind of talk, we are going nowhere”, adds his mother Nadine. No matter the temptation of historical revisionism, no matter the excesses, the embarrassment will not prevent these voters from slipping a Zemmour ballot into the ballot box next April.