The associate professor at the University of Paris-Est-Créteil in political communication and co-author of a book on Marine Le Pen, Stéphane Wanich, did “not the impression” than Eric Zemmour “will be able to get out of the impasse in which he is” with the Gaullist-inspired staging of the video announcing his presidential candidacy.
franceinfo: Does the official announcement of Eric Zemmour’s candidacy change things?
It changes his status. From a putative candidate, he becomes a real candidate, so that means that everything he says now will count for the construction of his presidential image. The problem is that the sequence that we experienced last week or even the last 15 days means that there is an image repair to be done and here I am not sure that the video of his ad does this repair. ‘picture. In my opinion, there are two problems for Eric Zemmour. The first is that “make president”, it is to bring together the French and there his speech is enormously divisive, sometimes scandalous on the Dreyfus affair, on Marshal Pétain, etc. The second thing is that you have to be credible in economic and social terms, but he has no rhetoric. It has a mono-discourse which is linked to the decline of France which is a recurring theme of the National Front elsewhere and a discourse on security, immigration, etc. But what about new technologies, nanotechnologies, the future of France at this level, there is no talk. To become president, it is not enough to denounce a situation, it is also to propose something and there, we are in a vacuum for the moment. But the campaign has only just begun.
In the video of his announcement, he speaks into a microphone placed on a table, in front of a bookcase filled with old books and with classical music in the background. What does this evoke?
It is a symbolic system of yesterday’s France. The video was mainly used to talk about it in traditional media because on YouTube about 35,000 people watched, so that’s not what will make a campaign. On the other hand, he summons the whole symbolic system of finding the France of De Gaulle, when she was strong and powerful in the world. There is the Élysée library behind, like that of Mitterrand, de Gaulle. The microphone means that France must be saved in danger. It is the symbol of the call of June 18. These are exactly the themes of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1990s: France in decline on the one hand, the betrayal of the elites on the other and there is the savior who takes the Gaullian form for Éric Zemmour – unlike Jean-Marie Le Pen. Classical music serves to reinforce a classical vision. We are not in rap, in RNB. It reinforces the traditionalist image of Eric Zemmour and at the same time it creates a kind of dynamic. That said, we could have expected Eric Zemmour to make a break with his disastrous electoral strategy of the last 15 days and there we see that he continues his momentum, which is also good in terms of strategy of political communication because creating a rupture is never good, but at the same time I don’t have the impression that he will be able to get out of the impasse in which he is with that.
Do you think the image of Eric Zemmour doing a middle finger will stay?
This is the whole issue of this official start of the campaign in the sense that it has a fairly significant liability. The middle finger has been talked about a lot but there is also his private life, his support for the Manif pour tous, his comments on the victims of Mohammed Merah, the report to the Dreyfus affair, the report to Marshal Pétain. . He may have gone a little too far and maybe the French will not forget, so the whole point for him is to move on. The trouble is that in his video he stays on the same theme so for the moment he does not have the political or ideological will to move on. As long as he is in this mono-discourse, I think his image will not be repaired. The French do not have that short memory. A president must be reassuring and balancing for France and he, for the moment, has only been unbalancing and “troublemaker” in relation to the very theoretical civil war that France could experience. To become president, you have to have a project, go into a history and represent France and for the moment it is more in a representation of its own ideology than of the concerns of the French.