Return on the first speech of the candidate Eric Zemmour. It was held Sunday, December 5 in Villepinte in front of more than 10,000 people. He spoke of immigration, lower taxes, but also of the special bond that unites him to the French people. A populist discourse certainly, but not only, I will come back to it. For then, I would indeed like to focus on a theme that Eric Zemmour has extensively developed, that of the very special link that would unite him to the French people: “Each time I travel, they are enraged, seeing this people they thought were gone forever. If they hate me, it’s because they hate you. If they despise me, it’s because they despise you. You have arrived, we have arrived, and we have overturned the best established plans. “ That is a fallacy. It is even the definition of the fallacy by division: what is true for the part would be true for the whole, and vice versa.
In this case, Eric Zemmour being part of the people, if his opponents despise him, it is because they also despise the people. On the one hand, it would already be necessary to prove that Eric Zemmour really arouses contempt, which does not seem obvious to me. And, on the other hand, the assertion does not go without saying: one could despise Eric Zemmour, without despising all the groups to which he belongs! But regardless, the objective of this statement is not to be rigorous, but to generate resentment in its listeners; to use this resentment to weld an identification between Eric Zemmour and the people; and to oppose this alliance to an adversary. It’s “you and me” versus “they”.
And who is he then this adversary who despises the people? That’s the whole question indeed, and Eric Zemmour answers it very explicitly: “In each election, the system carefully excludes candidates who it displeases with its judges and its militant journalists. Our meetings disturb journalists, annoy politicians and hysterize the left. They want to prohibit us from defending our ideas. They want me. make ineligible, they want to steal democracy from you. A little later, Eric Zemmour also adds Les Républicains and Emmanuel Macron; and finally, “the system”. So here are those who want “steal democracy” to the people. And that’s it. The puzzle is complete. Eric Zemmour describes himself as the only representative of a people who would have been betrayed by all powers, political, judicial and media. This opposition is the exact definition of what in political science has been called populism.
The problem is that this description can apply to many other politicians as well. Isn’t dressing up Zemmour with this qualifier a way of discrediting him? We find this rhetorical structure in Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen, and we even heard it in certain statements by Nicolas Sarkozy. So much so, moreover, that the word ended up meaning nothing. But I believe that with Eric Zemmour, it is time to bring it out of the concept cupboard. For two reasons. The first is a question of degrees. At Eric Zemmour, the opposition between “the people” and “the system” is not anecdotal, it structures his entire speech. The second reason is a question of nature. There is something unique in Eric Zemmour’s rhetoric: “We are going to recover France against the cynics and the conceited, against those who have only contempt and snot in the back of their eyes, against all those who want to make us disappear. We stand up. The French people stand in front of them. all those who want to make it disappear, facing all those who want to deprive their children of heritage and greatness. This French people who will never lower their eyes to those who have sworn their loss. Our existence as a French people n is not negotiable. ”
In Eric Zemmour’s speech, the individuals who make up the system have not simply failed, failed, or even betrayed the people. They have “swore his loss” ; they want it “make disappear” and threaten to his “existence”. In other words, they would have a malicious, even perverse intention. This is a distinction that seems fundamental to me. This distinction is that which separates the adversary from the enemy. The one that distinguishes the one who fights us, from the one who wants to destroy us. The one we face at the ballot box, the one we fight against by all necessary means. This line has a name: it is that of representative democracy, that is to say of all the procedures which allow us to peacefully settle our collective disagreements. It seems to me that, yesterday, in his speech, Eric Zemmour set foot on a line, that which limits democratic rhetoric.