https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/eric-zemmour-french-jewish-trump
by MITCHELL ABIDOR AND MIGUEL LAGO
With his ability to control his own narrative, the one-man show is a symptom of the Americanization of French politics
In the space of only a few weeks, the bestselling, right-wing Jewish author Eric Zemmour has doubled his polling numbers for next year’s presidential elections in France, reaching an astonishing 17%. He is ahead of all other right-wing candidates, including Marine Le Pen, longtime standard bearer of the right, who has lost half of her support to Zemmour—himself now running second only to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. All this despite the fact that Zemmour does not lead or belong to a political party and has not even officially announced his candidacy. And yet the only topic of public debate six months before the election seems to be: Will he run? France’s right-wing and far-right parties are all looking over their shoulders, and even Macron is demonstrating concern, attacking Zemmour in public forums.
Zemmour is in some ways France’s Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, an outsider who claims to say what everyone else merely thinks. He wants to ban all immigration; he claims Muslims have “colonized” entire swaths of French cities; he considers France to be in a state of civil war with its Muslim population. Islam, for Zemmour, is by its nature a religion of terror.
But in saying these things out loud, Zemmour maintains important differences from the Le Pen dynasty: He has long positioned himself as the thinker of the right, producing bestsellers that delve into French history with a classically far-right slant, presenting a France facing decline, degeneration, and even national suicide by way of leftist ideology and the presence of large immigrant communities. He is a firm believer in “The Great Replacement,” which sees les Français de France supplanted by a new, Muslim French population, following an Islam that he believes is incompatible with “French values.” French universalism for Zemmour is an outgrowth of Christian universalism; and it is Catholicism that is the founding doctrine of the French nation. Despite this focus on Christianity, Zemmour is himself a Jew of Algerian Berber ancestry, the son of observant Jews who fled Algeria in 1958 during that country’s war of independence.
How is it that Zemmour’s improbable rise has already come to seem inevitable? The explanation can be found in the role of French media in the country’s political life, in Zemmour’s own ideas, and in the interaction of all this with his personal history.
Eric Zemmour’s Jewishness is a weapon he uses in disconcerting ways. Though he doesn’t hide his ancestry, it is not something that he foregrounds. He has defined his vision of Jewishness as that expressed in 1789 in the Comte de Clermont-Tonerre’s speech on religious minorities (“Nothing for the Jews as a nation, everything for the Jews as individuals”) and by Napoleon: “Henceforth you should consider Paris to be your Jerusalem.” And yet Zemmour’s Jewishness is always at his disposal, granting him license to make statements it would not be possible for a non-Jew to make.