From Paris
There are people who live in alternative worlds and manage to convince millions of citizens that this world is reality. Former American President Donald trump He did it in the United States Boris johnson in Great Britain and Jair bolsonaro in Brazil. Now, the French democracy, fully oriented towards the presidential elections of April 2022, does not lack its national pinocchio. Its impact is such that it has modified the electoral force relations between the parties and the electoral forecasts. It is a local singularity of such narrow thinking that it is surprising to note the magnitude of its audience and the state of suspense in which it has plunged France while it decides or not to stand in the elections. His name is Eric Zemmour, a misnamed television “journalist” who, rather, is one of those polemicist-panelists that abound in all countries. With a narrative of the extreme right, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, lesbianophobic and anti-feminist, Eric Zemmour has risen to a very high range of electoral preferences even though he is not yet an official candidate. He is on the heels of the leader of the French extreme right, Marine Le Pen, with whom he debated on television in addition to the head of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, absorbs voting intentions of the right and disrupts all the projections of the institutes opinion. The 2020 election does not depend on a political proposal but on nonsense.
References
Their political armor is a hodgepodge montage whose central ingredient is the idea that France is being replaced by Muslims. That current emerged first with the writer’s book Jean Raspail “The Camp of the Saints” (1973), a work that was the bedside book for Donald Trump and his witch-advisor, Steve Bannon. In these pages the author invents the landing of a million dark-skinned wretches on the coast of France. The second reference is Renaud Camus and two of his books: “De l’in-nocence. Abécédaire” (2010) and Le Grand Remplacement (2011). Both develop the theme of the replacement of western white societies. From fiction too, Michel Houellebecq exploited that threatened national vein in the novel Submission, in which he portrays a France presided over by a Muslim who imposes the use of sharia on the country. The essayist Bat Ye’or He also conceived a Muslim Europe which he renamed Eurabia. That is the theme with which, in magazines, newspapers and television, Eric Zemmour built his legitimacy. “The French look at the street, the Metro, the classrooms and especially the popular neighborhoods and see evidence of a great replacement.” With that ideology, with the French decadence as a scarecrow and a radiant talent to rewrite the history of France in his own way, has published four books, of which he sold tens of thousands of copies: “French Melancholy”, “The French Suicide”, “French Destiny” and “France has not said the last word”. Nothing has disturbed his ascension. Neither the accusations of sexual assault, and even less the convictions of justice for “provocation to racial discrimination” (2011), ”provocation to religious hatred towards Muslims (2018) and“ insults and provocation to hatred against Muslims ”. Eric Zemmour invented a French variant of global Trumpism: he is, like the original model, a clever promoter of fakenews and alternative facts, that is, that portion of reality that exists only because someone enunciates it. His additional specialty consists of “fakehistory”, that is, correcting historical facts, dates, data, episodes and characters to adapt them to his ideology.
Media
A pearl from one of his chronicles read on the CNews channel in June this year: ”the fascist movement was born on the left, it was born in Italy. Mussolini is a socialist. What is the name of the Nazi party ?. It is national-socialist. Socialist! Those people are then on the left ”. Another, on the same channel, in May 2021: “Christianity has been removed, and that is why we have Islam, it is a replacement religion.” Manipulated statistics, erroneous or false quotes, fabricated information, attacks on homosexuals, Muslims, women, Eric from France is a puppet whose lightness and influence surprises in a country that has such a solid political culture. However, it is unstoppable. Eric Zemmour, like other conservative thinkers, has monopolized parts of the hard right and the extreme right with the same intensity with which he appears in the media: Challenges, CNews, Le Figaro, France 2, BFMTV / RMC, RTL. Very few have closed their pages or their television or radio spaces. Eric Zemmour and his repainted fascism exerts an eerie fascination. Weekly polls prove his stellar journey. 5% of voting intentions in May, 6 in June, 10% in mid-September (Harris Interactive barometer). The latest survey places him side by side with Marine Le Pen. If he made his candidacy official, Eric Zemmour would obtain between 13 and 14 percent of the votes compared to the 16 that Marine Le Pen would collect. A month ago, the head of the French extreme right reached 24 percent of voting intentions. In the end, nobody knows if Eric Zemmour will play in the presidential elections. However, the specter of his candidacy has already altered a political game all the more upset since the two political parties that, for many decades, assumed political alternation in France, that is, socialism and the liberal conservative right, are going through a phase of sunset and decay. The theater is open so that any delusion is a more legitimate option than history itself or reason.
efebbro@pagina12.com.ar
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