(Yerevan) Eric Zemmour, a far-right candidate for the French presidential election in 2022, was greeted by a group of hostile protesters on Saturday evening upon his arrival at Yerevan airport in Armenia.
About twenty demonstrators, including the French, greeted Mr. Zemmour by shouting “Racist! “And waving signs in French” Not welcome, Eric Zemmour “, noted an AFP journalist.
“We are there to inform the Armenians of who Éric Zemmour is. He’s a very dangerous man, he’s a fascist, ”said Chiriné Orguekian, a 25-year-old Frenchwoman.
“His visit is a manipulation to obtain more votes from Franco-Armenians during the presidential election,” assured Gueorgui Vardanian, a 31-year-old Armenian biologist.
Eric Zemmour, whose program of the visit scheduled until Tuesday was not immediately known, quickly left the scene.
Mr. Zemmour said on Friday that he had chosen Armenia for this first campaign trip, because “it is an old Christian land, […] one of the cradles of our civilization ”.
“Armenia is in danger. It was already a martyr land during the time of the Ottoman Empire and massacres such as the Armenian genocide. Again, this country is harassed, and by its neighbor Azerbaijan, and especially by Turkey behind. We are here at the heart of the war of civilization, ”he added.
He is accompanied by the former sovereignist MEP Philippe de Villiers. The latter assured on Twitter before departure that he wanted “to send the Armenian people a message of hope, as well as to all Eastern Christians, today abandoned by the West which is losing the thread of its civilization”.
A limited number of media have been authorized by his team, “for security reasons,” to follow Mr. Zemmour in Armenia (CNews, Europe 1 and Le Figaro, to which France TV and AFP video were then added).
Mostly Christian Armenia and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan fought a short but bloody war in the fall of 2020 for control of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which left 6,500 dead.
Defeated, Armenia was forced to sign a ceasefire and cede several Azerbaijani regions it controlled around this separatist region. Since then, tensions have remained high and several incidents have raised fears of a resumption of fighting.