The tension has escalated in the French presidential campaign. While, on Saturday, The Republicans finally chose their candidate, Valérie Pécresse, at the end of an interminable race, Sunday, the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour made a show of force in the Paris suburbs.
At five months before the presidential election, fill hall no 6 of the Villepinte Exhibition Center, which has the area of five soccer fields, is not given to everyone. This is the kind of demonstrations to which Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande were accustomed at the end of the campaign. In front of a excited audience, very largely made up of young people, Éric Zemmour presented himself as “the little grain of sand which came to seize the machine”, while everyone was planning a second round, as in 2015, between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron.
“France is back,” he said, going up on stage. Glasses on his nose and more confident than usual, Eric Zemmour presented himself as the candidate who would finally fulfill the promises not kept by the right for forty years. “We have broken the perfidious pact between all the actors of this farce”, he declared. The one who grew up in an HLM in the Parisian suburbs presents himself as the candidate of “this people of France who have been there for 1000 years and who want to remain master at home”.
The reconquest
The candidate refuted the accusations of misogyny that are usually leveled at him. Evoking the influence of his mother, a Berber Jew, like him, who fled to France to seek “freedom”, Zemmour presented himself as “the only one to establish this link between a civilization that came from the other side of the Mediterranean and the threat it poses to women ”. Evoking head-on the accusations of racism of which he is the object, he affirms to be “the only one not to confuse the defense of our people and the hatred of the others”.
The assembly was marked by a scuffle with activists infiltrated in the room, whose t-shirts displayed the letters of “SOS Racism”. A young man also hit Eric Zemmour as he walked towards the stage, causing the latter to sprain his wrist. Several “anti-fascist” activists were arrested.
In this first campaign assembly, the candidate announced that his movement would be called The Reconquest, “because we are setting out to reclaim our country,” he said. The name obviously evokes the reconquest by the Christian kings of Spain invaded in 711 by the Muslim Moors, otherwise called Reconquered. The assembly was also the occasion for some rallies, including that of the Conservative Movement, formerly at Les Républicains, as well as Jacline Mouraud, a “yellow vest” from the very beginnings, who called for “a civic insurrection at the ballot box. “.
“Today is the end of demonization. This is proof that it doesn’t work, ”spokesperson Loup Bommier told us. Regarding the candidate of the traditional right of the Republicans (LR) appointed Saturday, Eric Zemmour was scathing: “Valérie Pécresse will promise everything and will not hold anything. She will act like Jacques Chirac, ”he said. “Your place is among us”, he launched on the other hand to the voters of the defeated candidate of LR Eric Ciotti.
Twenty-four hours earlier, it was indeed the president of the Île-de-France region and former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, Valérie Pécresse, who had won over her closest competitor, Eric Ciotti. Outsmarting all the forecasts and returning the favorite of the polls, Xavier Bertrand, to his kitchen, the 110,000 LR activists first voted on Thursday the two candidates considered the most firm in the fight against insecurity and immigration. In the second round, they chose the one with the most experience and seemed to offer a profile more likely to beat Emmanuel Macron.
“Nothing is ruined. We are not doomed to disorder or decline, she said. […] It is not France which is in question, it is its system, with its political immobility and its cowardice to act clearly and strongly. But a system changes, and a president changes too! “In a sentence obviously intended for Eric Zemmour, Valérie Pécresse invited the French to” turn the page Macron without tearing the pages of the history of France “.
A fragile unit
In this party removed from power for ten years and which plays its survival, Eric Ciotti nevertheless wins “a moral victory”, according to the dean of the French editorialists, Alain Duhamel. However, the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes is the only LR candidate to have declared that between Eric Zemmour and Emmanuel Macron, he would choose the first.
All in restraint and coldness, the candidate for managerial style, who presents herself as the “candidate to do”, has so far never exceeded 10 or 11% in the polls. Like all of its competitors on the right, it offers increased security in the face of Islamist separatism and a hard line on the issue of immigration. Valérie Pécresse also proposes to resort to the army to restore peace in the Islamized suburbs and a referendum on immigration in order to include in the Constitution that “the Republic limits the number of foreign nationals authorized to stay in France”.
However, it only took 24 hours for the displayed unit to fracture. “I support it, but I hear that my ideas are represented with force”, declared Sunday Éric Ciotti, who announced at the same time the creation of his movement called “Right”. “How to remain insensitive to Eric Zemmour’s speech for France? »Wrote on Twitter Guillaume Peltier, one of his main supporters, who is however vice-president of the Republicans.
Meanwhile, on the left, the president of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, held an assembly in La Défense, where he gathered only 3,000 people. “No, France is not the extreme right,” he said. France is social security, it is public health, it is emancipation, it is sharing. “