Shaken by the war in Ukraine, the candidate Eric Zemmour is going through a bad patch which has resulted in a sharp drop in the polls for a week. It’s even a downfall. The polemicist lost 3 to 4 points in a few days, he is estimated between 12 and 13% of voting intentions in the first round of the presidential election and finds himself dropped by his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen. He is even overtaken by Valérie Pécresse again. Eric Zemmour is therefore weighed down by his “poutinophilia”. He who had long dreamed of a “French Poutine” repeated until the end that the Russian president would not attack Ukraine and that you shouldn’t let yourself be intoxicated by “the propaganda of the American services”. All false. As war breaks out in Europe, Zemmour finds himself on the wrong side. Which makes it bad when you claim to be a patriot.
>> Zemmour, Le Pen, Mélenchon: the ambiguities of the presidential candidates in the face of Vladimir Putin’s Russia
Candidate Zemmour condemned Vladimir Putin’s attack, but not so clearly. He called Vladimir Putin a “sole aggressor”but he immediately set about overwhelming NATO’s responsibilities. Eric Zemmour has even taken up some of the Russian president’s claims as a treaty enshrining “the end of NATO expansion” or a status of neutrality for Ukraine.
Moreover, he is not in solidarity with the Ukrainians since he refuses that France welcomes refugees, including women and children fleeing Russian bombs. The far-right candidate wants to leave them in Poland, which already hosts several hundred thousand, because we must not “to tear them too far from their country…”, he said. Basically, Zemmour can’t break away from the Putin he has admired for so long. For years, he made some “the last rampart against multiculturalism and gay communitarianism” or a symbol of “Opposition to Western decadence”. Moreover, on Monday, while the bombs rained down on Kiev, Eric Zemmour, on RTL, still qualified Vladimir Putin as “authoritarian democrat”.
The candidate would undoubtedly prefer to change the subject. And come back to this fantasy of “great replacement” which he agitated for months. Eric Zemmour considers that the conflict in Ukraine is stealing the democratic debate… Except that we can affirm exactly the opposite: a war in Europe, almost at our doorstep, there is no presidential stake anymore strong to distinguish the candidates who tomorrow, once at the Elysée, would defend the freedom and independence of France. And the one who, on the contrary, faced with a threatening foreign power, would run the risk of being only the president of submission.