How Zemmour’s storm in a teacup hijacked French campaign – and helped Le Pen

All that fuss for just 7.1 percent. Veteran French journalist Laure Adler no doubt spoke for many colleagues when she voiced a “mea culpa” on Monday over the media’s treatment of Éric Zemmour’s campaign.

“As a journalist, I would like to do a mea culpa – and I think a lot of us should be concerned,” Adler said on France 5 television. “I think we played a part in the media bubble and the construction of Éric Zemmour’s candidacy.”

The media bubble ultimately failed to propel the extreme-right rabble-rouser into the second round of France’s presidential election, in which incumbent President Emmanuel Macron will once again face  Rassemblement national (National Rally) candidate Marine Le Pen. But its legacy threatens to weigh on a contest that pollsters have billed as a tight race, Adler warned.

She added: “I think Éric Zemmour’s candidacy, and this name that dominated the airwaves for two months, lent credit to the normalisation of Marine Le Pen.”

A prolific writer and advocate of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, according to which liberal elites are plotting to replace French nationals of White stock with immigrants, Zemmour bossed the early stages of the presidential campaign in the raucous, aggressive and iconoclastic manner of a Donald Trump – albeit with the veneer of cultured sophistication generally expected of a French presidential candidate.

Like the former US president, Zemmour cast himself as a truth-teller unconstrained by political correctness. His background as a talk-show pundit also mirrored Trump’s former TV stardom. Le Figaro, France’s traditional newspaper of the right, first lent him credibility with a weekly column. News channels like CNews then gave him a prime-time national audience – and a platform from which to voice vitriolic comments about Muslims and immigrants.

Zemmour’s sulphureous statements have resulted in three convictions for inciting hate speech (he is appealing the third) and repeatedly landed CNews in hot water. France’s broadcast regulator, Arcom (formerly the CSA), twice put the channel on formal notice over comments by the far-right pundit. Last year, in a first for a French news channel, it fined CNews €200,000 for speech inciting racial hatred. It also admonished the network for failing to ensure political balance in its broadcasting.

Creating the ‘Zemmour event’

As talk of a possible presidential run by Zemmour gained traction over the summer, dominating the airwaves, the regulator ruled in September that the pundit should be considered a political actor and have his broadcast time limited as a result. In response, CNews said he would stop appearing on his daily programme. But Zemmour’s exposure on the channel and other networks only increased.

Between September and December 2022, talk of Zemmour soaked up 44 percent of the airtime devoted to politics on Cyril Hanouna’s “Touche pas à mon poste”, an influential talk show hosted by sister channel C8, according to a study by media researcher Claire Sécail. The overall figure for the far right rose to 53 percent when counting other candidates, chief among them Le Pen.

>> Read more: Pushing far-right agenda, French news networks shape election debate

But CNews and other media outlets owned by tycoon Vincent Bolloré were not alone in obsessing over the former pundit and his favourite topics.

In an interview with FRANCE 24 earlier this year, Emmanuelle Walter, chief editor of media watchdog Arrêt sur image, said the focus on CNews concealed a broader rightward shift affecting swathes of the media establishment – and of which Zemmour’s overexposure is but a symptom.

“There has been a normalisation of the far right’s discourse on such topics as immigration, which is not backed up by any scientific evidence,” she explained. “Even well-meaning journalists often don’t realise that their own questions can be oriented, for instance when they touch on the ‘problem’ of immigration.”

The long rise of the far-right vote in France

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In the January edition of its quarterly magazine, Médiacritiques, the independent media observatory Acrimed noted that CNews’ main rival, BFMTV, gave Zemmour just as much attention – if not more – in the run-up to his presidential candidacy.

Despite only entering the race on November 30, Zemmour was regularly tested by pollsters as a potential candidate from the start of July. Talk of his impending bid became an obsessive theme throughout the pre-election campaign. As Acrimed wrote, in the three months leading up to his declaration, French media “created the ‘Zemmour event’, turning this non-candidate into the political debate’s centre of gravity”.

France’s ‘campagne de merde’

One consequence of the outsized media presence enjoyed by Zemmour and his preferred topics, chief among them immigration, was to sideline other issues that French voters deemed more important. They included purchasing power, the climate emergency and the plight of France’s health system – all issues that ranked higher among voters’ main concerns, according to pollsters.

By the time France’s strict campaign rules guaranteeing candidates equal airtime kicked in, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had upended the campaign, further marginalising most campaign issues – with the exception of the war’s impact on struggling French households’ cost of living.

An Ifop poll ahead of the first round found 80 percent of French people felt the campaign was “poor quality”. Another survey, by Ipsos-Sopra Steria, said 55 percent of respondents were “unhappy” and 37 percent downright “angry”. In the words of ruralist candidate Jean Lassalle, it was a “campagne de merde” (crap campaign).

The campaign’s late focus on purchasing power marked a turning point in the tussle between Zemmour and Le Pen for control of the far-right vote.

Until then, Zemmour’s unrivalled media exposure had allowed him to erode the National Rally’s support base while also luring swathes of voters from the mainstream conservatives. His ability to poach high-profile figures from Le Pen’s entourage – including her own niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen – suggested a possible changing of the guard on the far right.

Zemmour’s polling numbers peaked at 17-to-18 percent in October, at the height of the “media bubble”. He was still polling at around 14 percent in late February, splitting the far-right vote and threatening Le Pen’s chances of qualifying for the run-off. But the challenge petered out in the campaign’s final stretch as many Zemmour supporters drifted back to the National Rally.

“Once they saw Zemmour slipping in the polls, many far-right voters decided Le Pen’s candidacy looked stronger and went back to her,” Olivier Rouquan, a political analyst at the Cersa research centre in Paris, told FRANCE 24. “They voted tactically because they want the far right to win this election.”

At 23.2 percent in the first round, Le Pen ended up with more than three times as many votes as Zemmour.  Adding the 2.1 percent won by nationalist right-winger Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, their combined total brings the far right’s tally to an unprecedented 32.5 percent – underscoring a profound shift in the French electorate and pointing to a substantial reservoir of votes for Le Pen ahead of the April 24 run-off.

Trivialising Le Pen

Far from weakening the National Rally, Zemmour’s incendiary attacks on immigrants and Muslims helped trivialise his vision of the far right while allowing Le Pen – who has toned down her rhetoric – to come across as more respectable and “presidential”. This has helped Le Pen advance her great endeavour since she took over from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011: to detoxify a party long seen as a racist, anti-republican hideout for nostalgics of the colonial era.

“Just like in 2012, when she benefited from a positive comparison with her father’s excesses, Marine Le Pen is able to capitalise on Zemmour’s extreme radicalism, which in contrast makes her come across as calm, composed, open-minded and less divisive,” said Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University and research associate at Sciences Po in Paris, who has recently published a book on Zemmour’s rhetoric.

>> Read more: Spooked by immigration, Islam and ‘woke’ ideas: Who are Éric Zemmour’s supporters?

The National Rally leader noticeably softened her speech on the campaign trail, steering clear of controversy and putting a lid on the vituperations that once defined her party. Without renouncing her anti-immigrant stance, she studiously avoided talk of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory championed by Zemmour, which even the struggling conservative candidate, Valérie Pécresse, clumsily referenced.

When war broke out in Ukraine, the veteran far-right candidate showed a measure of empathy by speaking in favour of welcoming Ukrainian refugees – whereas Zemmour shocked the public by declaring that they should settle in Poland instead. 

Just like Zemmour, Le Pen has spoken admiringly of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in the past, laughing off suggestions that he might pose a threat to Europe. Fears that this might hurt her campaign prompted some party officials to hurriedly get rid of brochures that featured a picture of the National Rally leader posing with Putin at the Kremlin.

But on the subject of Russia too, Zemmour soaked up the opprobrium, leaving Le Pen largely untouched. Instead, the war highlighted Le Pen’s ability to turn an apparent setback into an opportunity, shutting out Zemmour’s identity politics and placing the debate firmly on her preferred terrain: surging prices and the plight of France’s hard-up.

With her far-right rival now out of the race, it remains to be seen whether Le Pen can continue to deflect the criticism and scrutiny in the coming days. As Zemmour himself argued in an interview last week, anticipating a possible defeat, “the minute Le Pen steps into the second round, she will be demonised anew”.