The far-right candidate for the 2022 presidential election Eric Zemmour was in Vendée on Saturday January 8. And who better than his old friend and now support Philippe de Villiers, former president of the General Council of Vendée and presidential candidate in 1995, to welcome Eric Zemmour, in a room crowded with several hundred admirers? “It is in this room that I came to present the skippers of the Vendée Globe, launches the sovereignist at the microphone. I present to you a skipper who has already faced the roaring 40th and the howling 50th. He’s splitting the blade, he’s not afraid, and he has a boat called Reconquest. “
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In front of chanting supporters “Zemmour president” and “We are at home”, Éric Zemmour is embarking on a series of historical references to salute the audacity shown by the Vendée and its inhabitants. But he also speaks economy in an emblematic department, according to him. “This miracle, says Eric Zemmour, it’s this incredibly low unemployment rate across the country. The Vendée is a real open-air lesson in economics, land use planning and reindustrialisation. No deindustrialization, no relocation, no metropolization and no immigration. “
Eric Zemmour takes the opportunity to mock Valérie Pécresse, the LR candidate, who is ahead of him in the polls. “She tries to ape Nicolas Sarkozy. Madame Pécresse takes the Kärcher out of her bag of tricks (…) The Kärcher’s blow, we have already had it, we must find better!” He defends a “right which does not seek to be accepted by the right-thinking but which seeks to win for France”, adding that he would offer “a case of cider for those who find a fundamental difference between Valérie Pécresse and Emmanuel Macron.”
According to the far-right candidate, Valérie Pécresse “refuses to debate” with him because “she is afraid that LR voters will discover her true face, the one she tries to hide: that of a true centrist and a true conformist”.
But identity questions are never far away. Eric Zemmour and Philippe de Villiers then go to the foot of a statue of Saint-Michel which is threatened with being unbolted after an appeal from a secular association. This association, Free Thought, demanded the removal of the statue from the public domain as a“manifest religious object”. “It is the symbol of our traditions, believes Eric Zemmour, of the millennial Christian roots in this region and throughout France. And it is above all the object of the idiotic retribution of secularists. These obsolete secularists who are useful idiots of the woke culture which also wants to destroy French traditions. “” Do not touch our statues “, echoed the demonstrators. The mayor of Sables-d’Olonne, Yannick Moreau (ex-LR), must dismantle this statue within six months, according to the decision of the administrative court of Nantes. But the elected representative intends to resist and launch a consultation with the inhabitants. He appealed against the administrative tribunal’s decision in December.