Campaign Chronicles: Zemmour and Ukraine
The Brink is a documentary about Trump strategist and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon (2019, directed by Alison Klayman, available on Amazon and Youtube). Specifically, it focuses on Bannon’s attempts to organize the populist parties throughout the European Union into a coalition that he was loosely calling “the movement.” Bannon was aiming for the upcoming European Parliament elections, in the spring of 2019, but more broadly at a worldwide–or at least, western–movement of authoritarianism based on rabid anti-immigrant/anti-Islam rhetoric. (My description.) About halfway through the film, we see a meeting at Marine Le Pen’s National Rally headquarters in Paris; Jérôme Rivière, a high official of the RN, soon to be elected as an MEP, was among those present. In late January Rivière left Marine Le Pen’s party for that of rival far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. (Rivière, still with the RN at the time of the making of this film, stands up as Bannon enters the wallpapered room.)
And of course Nigel Farage, of UKIP-Brexit fame, is also there.
The departure from Marine Le Pen’s ranks crescendoed in late January. She angrily told them to get out “now,” if they were going: “If you’re going to leave, leave! But do it now!”
https://youtube.com/shorts/vxlUwyZwjls?feature=share
Rivière made his announcement in Le Parisien. While grateful to Marine Le Pen for “having incarnated the defense of the French people for many years,” he had been disillusioned by the results of the Regional Elections of June 2021, when the party had failed to carry a single region. Just as seriously, the abstention rate, in which only between 30-35% of those eligible actually came out to vote, seemed to show a certain weariness with her leadership. This defeat became for him a “flagrant demonstration that Marine Le Pen is not in a position to win the presidential election.” She had realized that as well, he continued, and had made of her party “a raft of the Médusa,” referring to Géricault’s famous painting of the survivors of a shipwreck, enclosing a tight circle of insiders around her rather than embracing a policy of expansiveness. Further, as he suggested in this interview, her vision was small: in September, in announcing her campaign goals, she proposed the nationalization of the highways and the privatizing of public television–perhaps all right in themselves, he suggested, but far from the big issues that stirred him. He mentioned specifically the signature issues of Érik Zemmour: the “Great Replacement,” the migration of Muslims (primarily) from the global south, which is driving down the living standards of the French (le Great Déclassement, or loss of status). As for the fact that Zemmour was behind her in the polls, it did not matter; Zemmour was not a politician: he had entered the race only in late November, and had “turned over the tables” of the presidential race.
Jérôme Gérichault, The Raft of the Medusa
Le Monde suggested rather more cynically that he had been passed over for a spot on the executive bureau of the RN, which had in contrast seen the appointment of new faces, and especially of women. They also noted that Rivière has long been a great admirer of Donald Trump (“he for a long time relayed [Trump’s] accusations of fraud in the American presidential election on social media”), and as a good friend of Steve Bannon, he had even invited him to an RN party congress in Lille, in 2018. (See Steve Bannon at Lille).
But speaking of shipwrecks . . .
Zemmour has made a number of missteps after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the beginning, and before the invasion occurred, he had blamed NATO for causing the ongoing tensions. The expansion of NATO “right to Russia’s doorstep” had been itself a provocation: “NATO has no reason to exist, in all truth.”
Then, in a not-so-veiled criticism of President Emmanuel Macron, Zemmour suggested that two special envoys, former president Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Party member Hubert Védrine, should be sent to Kyiv and to Moscow. Védrine responded to this suggestion bluntly: “That’s idiotic, Macron has done the best possible.” (Perhaps Zemmour should have asked Védrine before anointing him.) As for Sarkozy, there seems to have been no real response; Macron, in the meantime, has consulted with Sarkozy, who also had some experience with Putin during his term.
Then Zemmour announced that the Ukrainian war was a distraction from the “real” issue, which is immigration. He almost immediately tried to clean up the remark, as shown in the video below, by saying that the war was “turning our attention away” from the issues that would preoccupy France in the next five years; but the words had been said.
Valérie Pécresse’s campaign was quick to pounce, with the following: “Total ideological shipwreck of Éric Zemmour who thinks that the war in Ukraine is a ‘distraction’. Thousands of deaths. Violation of international treaties. And Éric Zemmour speaks of ‘distraction’. How shameful.”
In the United States, J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, said much the same thing, only in a significantly cruder way; there was little apparent media reaction to this.
Zemmour significantly needed a reset, and so he held a major event today in Toulon. At the center of it was a further laundering of his Ukraine position; and, more happily, the rallying of Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece and Jean-Marie’s granddaughter, to Zemmour’s candidacy.
Will that do the trick? And Marechal is, by the way, a friend of Bannon. Who remains in the US, dealing with the real issues.
More later.
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Alexandre Sulzer, “Jérôme Rivière, patron des eurodéputés RN: ‘J’ai choisi de soutenir Éric Zemmour,’” Le Parisien, January 19, 2022. https://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/jerome-riviere-patron-des-eurodeputes-rn-jai-choisi-de-soutenir-eric-zemmour-19-01-2022-4T3HKN3R75CLPP2EUTPXIXITTI.php?ts=1645211889227
Franck Johannés, “Jérôme Rivière: les raisins de la défection de l’eurodéputé RN au profit d’Eric Zemmour,” Le Monde, January 20, 2022.https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2022/01/20/presidentielle-2022-les-raisons-de-la-defection-de-l-eurodepute-rn-jerome-riviere-au-profit-d-eric-zemmour_6110253_6059010.html
Gilles Paris, “French far-right candidates in Putin’s Den,” Le Monde (in English), February 22, 2022. https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/02/22/french-far-right-candidates-in-putin-s-den_6114763_5026681.html
