Campaign Chronicles: The Smirk

Emmanuel Macron has stated that he will not debate before the first round of elections, which will take place on April 10.  If he were to do so, he would be facing eleven other candidates who would devote much of their time to attacking him; and he would have only his own two or three minutes to respond to all of them. Mass debates, as we learned in the 2016 Republican and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, can be enlightening, but the presence of an incumbent probably makes a great deal of difference.  

Some of the candidates have been attempting to challenge each other, and this past week (on March 10) Valérie Pécresse, of Les Républicains, took on Éric Zemmour, of Réconquête!  

Pécresse was reelected in the summer of 2021 to a second term as president of the Ile-de-France region (Paris and the surrounding area).  She has served as a deputy in the National Assembly as well as holding several cabinet positions  in the Sarkozy administration, including the posts of Minister of the Budget (in the difficult post-2008 years) and Minister of Higher Education and Research.  

Éric Zemmour is a television personality.

Both candidates needed to do some damage control.  One candidate was successful, but it might not matter.

For Éric Zemmour, of course, the problem was his unabashed support of Putin.  In an earlier interview on CNews/E1, Zemmour stated that Ukrainians had persecuted ethnic Russians in the Donbass region.  He said that the expansion of NATO to the east violated a promise that George H.W. Bush had made to Russia (see the RadioFreeEurope article, below, for a discussion of the issue and its afterlife).  This expansion of Nato, he continued, had been “legitimately seen as an aggression by Russia.”  Imagine, he wondered, how the Americans would feel if Russia put missiles in Cuba (we don’t have to imagine, actually) or Mexico?  NATO, he stated here, was an obsolete organization that had no reason to exist.  Zemmour asserted, finally, that there would be no war: US propaganda was stirring up the issue in order to turn public opinion against Russia.  

Zemmour’s interview took place on February 20, 2022.

Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of Les Républicains, was widely critiqued for her campaign launch on February 13, 2022, at the Zenith amphitheater outside Paris.   (See Campaign Chronicles: Zenith).  As it has been noted, she is much better as a debater than as a speechmaker, and it was generally agreed that she had flattened Zemmour in this March 10 event.

The first question in the debate was why each thought the other would not make a good president.  Pécresse, who went first, opened with Ukraine.  In France, she said, there is the spirit of De Gaulle, and the spirit of Munich, which had allowed Hitler to attack Czechoslovakia.  (Throughout her statement, Zemmour was nodding and what might be described as “smirking”; one of the commentators afterwards mentioned that sarcastic, arrogant look.)  Those of Munich, she continued, were also fascinated by the force of Hitler, as Zemmour had been by the force of Putin.  Zemmour had said that Putin is a democrat, that he is the aggressed against, instead of the aggressor, that we need a French Putin.  She noted that he had said that he would not accept Ukrainian refugees.  

Zemmour began his response by saying that she “seemed not to understand” that De Gaulle went to see Stalin in 1944 (in December, post-D-Day, to discuss the post-war settlement).  He continued, at some length, to instruct her on the history of the late 20th century.  This was not a good tactic.

The refugees, he concluded, actually prefer to go to Poland.

When Zemmour finally got around to the question of why Pécresse would not make a good president, it was because she had changed her mind on various issues over the years.  His first example was the same-sex marriage law passed in 2013, or mariage pour tous, which she had opposed but now supported.   He had a few other examples, but concluded: “That is the difference between us–you evolve with society, in reality you’re only a technocrat, a manager . . . politics is about having convictions.”  In other words, in a phrase made popular by US Republicans earlier in this century, she is a “flip-flopper.”

Zemmour’s understanding of women’s place has certainly not evolved; he wrote The First Sex in 2006, arguing that the decline of the West had occurred because of the “feminization,” the loss of “virility,” of society. And a selection of comments over the years, assembled below, suggests that he doesn’t see women as suitable for politics, or perhaps much else.

And his fixed convictions apparently don’t extend to his marriage vows, or to his wife of nearly 40 years. The celebrity-gossip magazines Gala and Closer were all over this story last fall, and Paris-Match published a cover photo of the 63-year old Zemmour at the beach with the 28-year-old campaign “director” (she has now been elevated to the “soul” of the campaign), to the point that Zemmour was finally forced to admit (to Elle) that the woman, whom he had met when she was 13, was his “companion.”  She is now quite visible at campaign events.

The editor of Paris-Match was fired.

In the end, and in spite of the Pécresse campaign efforts and the pompous emptiness of Zemmour, the needle has not moved very much.  In a poll of yesterday (March 14, 2022), only a few days after the showdown, Pécresse was still fifth; Zemmour had moved to third place, just behind Le Pen. Here, the latest Ifop poll.

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Header image by Shutterstock.com.

Gossip–even the London Times!

Charles Bremner, “Young aide Sarah Knafo ‘has would-be French president Eric Zemmour in her grip,’” The Times, October 29, 2021.https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/young-aide-has-would-be-french-president-in-her-grip-qr3j72dgg

Victorian Trébeau, “Éric Zemmour: Sarah Knafo le suivra-t-elle à l’Élysée? Sa réponse cash,” Gala, February 16, 2022.https://www.gala.fr/l_actu/news_de_stars/eric-zemmour-sarah-knafo-le-suivra-t-il-a-lelysee-sa-reponse-cash_487351

Xavier Terrade, “Sarah Knafo omniprésente pour Éric Zemmour: ce surnom donné par ses équipes,” Gala, March 10, 2022. https://www.gala.fr/l_actu/news_de_stars/sarah-knafo-omnipresente-pour-eric-zemmour-ce-surnom-donne-par-ses-equipes_488985

Mike Eckel, “Did the West Promise Moscow that NATO Would Not Expand?  Well, It’s Complicated,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 19, 2021.  https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-expansion-russia-mislead/31263602.html

For Radio Free Europe, see the Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe