“If someone had told me six months ago that Marine Le Pen would score better than in 2017, I would have immediately signed with both hands.” Louis Aliot is on a small cloud at the announcement of the qualification of the candidate of the National Rally for the second round of the presidential election, Sunday, April 10. In a pavilion in the Bois de Vincennes transformed into a crowded electoral headquarters, the mayor of Perpignan summarizes: “She gains two points compared to her score of five years ago when she faced a candidate who spent his time hitting her and hunting on her electoral lands. It is exceptional what ‘she did.”
>> Presidential election 2022: follow our Live
the “candidate”, it’s Eric Zemmour. Arrived fourth (7.07%), very far behind Emmanuel Macron (27.84%) and Marine Le Pen (23.15%), the former far-right polemicist, credited with 16 to 17% of intentions to vote in mid-February, did not go the distance. “We still smashed it well”exults an elected marinist, just before Eric Zemmour calls on his voters to vote for Marine Le Pen in the second round, on April 24.
This support was freshly welcomed by the tenors of the party, who fear that the radicalism of Eric Zemmour will deteriorate the new image that Marine Le Pen is trying to send back to public opinion.
“Even if he fought us, we are not going to be sorry that someone is calling to vote for us! But the strong rejection he arouses among the French should not be carried over to Marine. is not like him at all.”
An RN executiveat franceinfo
For many of those close to her, Marine Le Pen has come a long way. “Where Eric Zemmour surprised me was that I didn’t think he would be this low”recognizes Damien Monchau, regional coordinator of “Youth with Marine”.
Long before officially entering the race for the Elysée, on November 30, 2021, Eric Zemmour had launched a vast takeover bid on the National Rally and Les Républicains. Its stated objective was to “gather the rights” and therefore to weaken Marine Le Pen and Valérie Pécresse as much as possible with political rallies for his benefit.
Far from responding to her rival’s outbidding, Marine le Pen first decided to be discreet, to conduct a low-noise campaign, far from Paris and the excesses of her adversary. While Eric Zemmour hits hard on television sets and goes on to miss trips (like in Marseille where he responds, at the end of November, to the provocation of a passer-by with a middle finger), the RN candidate goes to meet French people living in rural areas and in medium-sized towns to talk to them about purchasing power.
Marine Le Pen is betting everything on this theme, even if it means leaving the field open to Eric Zemmour on immigration and identity. “Instead of commenting on the actions of Eric Zemmour as the media did, she chose to go directly to meet the French, and it paid off”welcomes today Sébastien Chenu, RN deputy from the North.
Faced with an Eric Zemmour who has become omnipresent in the media, Marine Le Pen is still adapting her campaign behind the scenes. Also in November, she unveiled two new election posters to relaunch a slipping first-round campaign. Their themes: purchasing power, but also immigration. “Nor could she completely leave him the monopoly on identity issues and appear as an overly soft candidate who has changed completely”, admits a tenor of the National Rally, surprised at the time by Eric Zemmour’s ability to crystallize the political debate around his candidacy. Marine Le Pen observes but does not doubt.
“In October, when Eric Zemmour starts to get restless, she assures us that he won’t do more than 10% and that she will be in the second round. It gave us incredible energy.”
A member of Marine Le Pen’s campaign teamat franceinfo
Without responding blow for blow to his far-right rival who accuses him of having “the reflexes of a left-wing woman”Marine Le Pen distills her criticisms to try to achieve the credibility of her adversary. “Nobody can talk to him, because Eric Zemmour has the feeling of being General de Gaulle reincarnated, he is self-centered”, she describes in an interview on Europe 1 at the beginning of winter. It also warns: “He does not have the experience that I have of saying ‘beware of mirages. A presidential campaign is a long, difficult path, it is an initiatory journey. You have to have suffered, to have fallen, and he has never Do it.”
Convinced that he will manage to unite the rights, the ex-journalist continues the provocations. At the same time, he managed to convince executives of the National Rally to join him. MEP Jérôme Rivière is the first to position himself, joined by deputies Gilbert Collard, Nicolas Bay and even Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen. The defections, numerous, do not worry too much in the ranks of the RN.
“I still wonder today about the lucidity of these people who joined himsays Louis Aliot. When Jérôme Rivière came to see me to tell me that he was going to Zemmour, I told him that he was doing the bullshit of his life. A feeling shared by Steeve Briois, the RN mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, who says he does not have “never doubted”.
“It’s like Chevènement, Villiers or Bayrou before him. They appeared suddenly and then they collapsed. There is the politics of Twitter, totally above ground, and that of the field.”
Steeve Briois, RN mayor of Hénin-Beaumontat franceinfo
Marine Le Pen commented little on these defections, but when Marion Maréchal left for Eric Zemmour, she lapsed into pathos rather than attacks. “With Marion, I have a special story because I raised her with my sister during the first years of her life. Obviously, it’s brutal, it’s violent, it’s difficult for me. We don’t know. never expect this kind of decision”she launched on January 28 on CNews.
When Eric Zemmour experiences a real surge in the polls in February, propelling him between third and second place, behind Emmanuel Macron, the MP for Pas-de-Calais ends up pulling out the heavy artillery and directly targets those whom her supporters call from now on “traitors”.
In an interview at Figarothe contender for the Elysée delivers for the first time her own definition of zemmourism. “I find in Eric Zemmour a whole series of chapels which, in the history of the National Front, have come and gone, filled with sulphurous characters. There are traditionalist Catholics, pagans and a few Nazis. All this does not make a presidential position”, she tackles. A relative of the candidate abounds: “No one informed her of her departure from Zemmour, when they owe her everything.” He also attributes to the candidate a joke which, according to him, “a lot makes you laugh” : “All those who left have less courage than the guys who dump their wives by text!”
In parallel, the two candidates clash the same weekend by meetings interposed. On February 5, Eric Zemmour presented his new recruits to his supporters at the Zenith in Lille, while Marine Le Pen held a meeting in Reims. Against all odds, she plays the intimate card. She pours out about her childhood, her difficult relationship with her father, her life as a single mother…
“Marine is very modest, but she understood that to pass a milestone, she had to give of herself. So she wrote this very intimate moment without telling anyone.”
A member of the National Rallyat franceinfo
It was during an informal dinner, a few weeks earlier, when she opened up to the guests about her desire to confide, that this idea was prompted to her, says a relative. “I remember a communications adviser who was at his table that night suggested he walk past the desk and completely break the codes.”
At the end of February, the war in Ukraine broke out and pushed the presidential election into the background. The fight against immigration and security, Eric Zemmour’s two favorite themes, find less of an echo in the campaign, while the question of purchasing power defended by Marine Le Pen, against a backdrop of increasing fuel and gas prices, continues to make money.
The ambiguities of the two candidates around Vladimir Putin’s policy could also have sent them back to back. But there again, it is Marine Le Pen, no doubt strong from the experience of her three presidential campaigns, who emerges as the winner of this sequence. She is keeping a low profile on the subject, despite her alleged links to Vladimir Putin. Eric Zemmour persists and signs. On RTL, he refuses in particular to qualify Vladimir Putin as a dictator and prefers to speak of “authoritarian democrat”. An exit that several relatives of the candidate, like the former prefect Gilbert Payet, did not understand.
“Eric Zemmour may have made the mistake of giving his opinion on the invasion of Ukraine.”
Gilbert Payet, financial agent of the candidateat franceinfo
The Trocadéro meeting organized by the nationalist candidate in the last weeks of the campaign in front of nearly 50,000 sympathizers and the strategy of an alleged “hidden vote” in his favor do not change anything. At the beginning of April, Marine Le Pen outdistances her competitor very largely in the polls by tirelessly pursuing her presidentialization and the trivialization of her far-right program.
On the evening of April 10, when she spoke to celebrate her qualification for the second round against Emmanuel Macron, the RN candidate, once again, only mentioned immigration and security on the margins. She promises to place at the heart of her five-year term “purchasing power” or “equality between men and women”. It is still the theme of the purchasing power that she draws, from the first day of the campaign between the two towers, by going to a cereal farmer in the Yonne.
“Now, for the remaining 15 days of campaigning, it will be balance sheet against project. Our project is to roll out concrete measures on rural areas, purchasing power and above all to tell the truth to the French to bring together the people and not divide it as Emmanuel Macron did for five years”, asserts Louis Aliot. In the camp of Marine Le Pen, who on Tuesday excluded the “possibility” to govern with Eric Zemmour, it is as if the former polemicist no longer existed. Leaving with a bang but curtly eliminated, the latter failed to deprive his far-right rival of what she has been dreaming of for five years: revenge against Emmanuel Macron.