Far-right presidential hopeful Éric Zemmour stole more thunder from his right-wing rival Marine Le Pen on Tuesday by touting a “long and friendly” conversation with Donald Trump, the former US president whose support Le Pen had long courted, but in vain.
Trump, whose 2016 presidential run has been cited as a blueprint for Zemmour’s current bid for the Élysée Palace, urged the former far-right pundit to "stand his ground, hang in there and keep his spirits up" in a 40-minute phone conversation late on Monday, Zemmour’s spokesman Guillaume Peltier told the France 2 broadcaster. "Tenacity and stamina" will pay off, Trump reportedly said.
A prolific writer and advocate of the "Great Replacement" theory, according to which liberal elites are plotting to replace French nationals of White stock with immigrants, Zemmour has dominated the early stages of the presidential campaign in the raucous, aggressive and iconoclastic manner of Trump – albeit with the veneer of cultured sophistication generally expected of a French presidential candidate.
Fashioning his pitch on Trump’s successful White House run, Zemmour has positioned himself as an outsider to traditional parties and the French political establishment. A string of mishaps saw him dip in the polls at the start of the year but the political novice has since bounced back, notably poaching high-profile defectors from both the mainstream conservatives and Marine Le Pen’s far-right supporters.
Zemmour, 63, is currently fourth in opinion polls but closing in on both Le Pen and conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse. The trio are competing for an increasingly porous right-wing electorate, blurring the line between mainstream conservatism and the far right. With left-wing candidates in the doldrums, whoever wins this three-way race on the right looks set to take on incumbent Emmanuel Macron in the April 24 run-off.
Trump, Zemmour ‘pushing for the same thing’
Zemmour's team said the call with Trump had been "long and friendly", covering migration, security and economic issues in both countries. "They're both pushing for the same thing – Donald Trump wants the US to remain the US, and Eric Zemmour wants France to remain France," the campaign said in a statement.
Like the former US president, Zemmour has cast himself as a truth-teller unconstrained by political correctness. His background as a talk-show pundit also mirrors Trump’s former TV stardom. While Le Figaro, France’s traditional newspaper of the right, lent him credibility with a weekly column, it was CNews, a Fox News-style television channel, that gave him a prime-time national audience – and a platform from which to lambast French elites and voice vitriolic comments about Muslims and immigrants.
Zemmour, who has three convictions for hate speech, recently called for the European Union to build a wall along "all its borders" to keep out immigrants, apparently inspired by Trump's project, never realised, to build a wall on the US border with Mexico. The cover of his latest book, “France has not said its last word” – featuring Zemmour, arms crossed, in front of the French flag – was also modelled on Trump’s 2015 release, “Great Again”.
The phone call with Trump, whose support Le Pen has courted in the past, will be seen as a further blow to the head of the National Rally party (formerly the National Front). It comes just days after the party’s only senator, Stéphane Ravier, defected to Zemmour’s camp. In her 2017 presidential campaign, Le Pen sought to play up her proximity to Trump when she travelled to the Manhattan business headquarters of the former US president, only to slip out discreetly when nobody received her.
Zemmour’s spokesman Peltier, who himself defected from the more mainstream conservative Les Républicains party, said his team had approached Trump's staff several times and had been "very pleased to take the call". He added: "It's very clear to everybody that the duel emerging in France is between Emmanuel Macron and Éric Zemmour."
