Opinion – Mathias Alencastro: Real life of Zemmour’s campaign in France starts with embarrassment and tension

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The preview of the French traditional right met its ending last Saturday (4) with the victory of Valérie Pécresse, former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy and president of the Île de France region, which encompasses the city of Paris.

Contrary to the disastrous experience of the PSDB, the Republicans’ preview, the target of many protests and jokes, ended on schedule and without technical occurrences or backstage screaming.

Pécresse is not a first-rate figure, and doubts persist about his competitiveness. But the candidacy, clearly more moderate than the others, demarcates the space of the traditional right in relation to the other rights that dispute the presidency.

In the image of the winner of the previous tucana João Doria, who has to live in the shadow of Sergio Moro, Pécresse —the first woman to run for the presidency for Charles de Gaulle’s party— was overshadowed by the lights of the new star of the conservative countryside, Eric Zemmour, who held its first rally this Sunday (5) at the Zénith Paris arena.

Characters whose charisma is inversely proportional to the passion they arouse, Moro and Zemmour compete for the same position within the conservative camp of their respective countries. Armed with a dogmatic and Sebastianist discourse, which demonizes a part of the population for ethnic reasons, in the case of the French, or ideological, in the case of the former Brazilian judge, they seek to recover voters disillusioned with the far right and loot what is left of the political capital of the traditional right.

Zemmour and Moro are candidacies-symptoms of the systemic crisis that crosses the conservative field, henceforth fractured into distinct lineages.

For the Frenchman, the problems started earlier than expected. The first attempt to leave the comfort zone of television and social media resulted in moments of embarrassment and tension. In London, Zemmour, who aspired to repeat Charles de Gaulle’s glorious script during World War II exile, visiting Parliament and BBC headquarters, was eventually relegated to a roadside hotel and an interview with the right-wing press radical.

Back in France, he left for Marseilles, the emblematic city of multiculturalism, which he describes as a postcard of a disastrous future if nothing is done to stop the migration of Muslims. The visit ended with insults, bottled ups and a moment of imbalance —Zemmour gave a woman the middle finger— that hurt the image of the only man capable of moralizing France.

It’s still too early to anticipate what the pace of Sergio Moro’s campaign will be. Contradictory information circulates about its real electoral potential. Zemmour’s candidacy, without a party or organized funding, suffers from structural problems that have already been overcome by the former Brazilian judge.

But the Frenchman’s recent weeks have shown that the real-life landing of campaigns created in the audiovisual universe is unpredictable. A month ago, when I wrote about French for the Ilustríssima, my interlocutors swore that Zemmour would be in the second round with Emmanuel Macron. Today, the same people believe that it is just a passing fever.

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