The year 2021 is ending and it is, of course, necessary to talk about 2022, a year that promises to be marked by fierce political disputes and a fearful polarization. And we are not just dealing with the presidential election in Brazil, but also in France.
A red light lights up when talking about Éric Zemmour, candidate of the French extreme right, with no less than 17% of preferences in opinion polls. Zemmour is a Jew of Algerian origin, and this place of speech has been used by him in a treacherous and disturbing way in the pre-election campaign.
Perhaps nothing was as surprising as his attempt to rehabilitate the WWII collaborationist regime, when he said on French TV that “Vichy protected French Jews and gave shelter to foreigners.” It is known that no fewer than 72,500 Jews were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps at that time.
Zemmour also revisited the Dreyfus affair, one of the most celebrated reports of anti-Semitism on French soil, in which the French Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason early in the last century. For him, Alfred Dreyfus’ innocence “is not evident”.
Zemmour started his career with a classic trajectory in France. He studied at Sciences Po, a university attended by the highest echelons of national politics. But he failed the entrance exam for the ENA, the National School of Administration, which basically everyone who aspires to a higher position in the public service has to pass.
And this is important, because Zemmour is a figure —like most figures on the far right—, extremely complex. The complex and the hatred he has for technocrats, which is the first great hatred he harbors, comes precisely from this rejection.
Zemmour built his fame as a polemicist on television shows and also as an essayist and newspaper columnist — the author of three books, he wrote at Le Figaro until a month ago.
Fundamentally, he proposes the rescue and supremacy of an essentially conservative and western France, threatened by foreign cultures and religions brought by the migratory waves.
Of France’s estimated 6 million Muslims, about 10% of the population, Zemmour says they should “be given the opportunity to choose between Islam and France.”
Not by chance, in an interview with Le Monde, Jean-Marie Le Pen —the main figure on the French extreme right since World War II and father of the candidate Marine Le Pen— commented: “The only difference between me and Zemmour is that he is Jewish , so it’s difficult to qualify him as a Nazi or a fascist; that gives him great freedom.” That’s the point: Zemmour sets himself up as someone who wipes out accusations of Nazism and anti-Semitism by his Jewish identity.
And who feels more authorized to go further on the agenda of the far right. While Marine Le Pen wants to eliminate immigration in France, Zemmour wants the French to stop being French because they are not white.
It’s an intricate and frightening scenario. In opinion polls, Le Pen is technically tied for second with Zemmour in voter preferences — current president Emmanuel Macron leads with 28 percent.
Zemmour is ambiguous in many directions. When asked about his relationship with Judaism, he says he doesn’t believe in God but attends synagogues and only eats kosher food. He is not a religious Jew, he is not an orthodox Jew. In his layer of priorities, he’s French first, before anything else. And to be French, in his perspective, is to be a member of a Judeo-Christian civilization, which is the desire of the French new right.
In this context, it is worth remembering that Algerian Arabs never had the right to citizenship — but Algerian Jews did.
In this sense, dealing with Zemmour is fundamentally dealing with a new, more radical, more poignant, more important and more sophisticated version of Judaism. Zemmour brings the idea that the Jew can be accepted if he gives up his belief in liberalism and citizenship.
“Zemmour is dangerous and insults Jewish morals,” says French writer and intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of its most prominent critics.
“To see this man not only desecrate his name but also stand against all that the Jewish hope has fought for millennia is an unbearable obscenity,” wrote Lévy.
The French Jewish community, of about half a million people, is the largest in Western Europe. Many members, particularly those of Sephardic descent who live in poor suburban areas where episodes involving anti-Semitism by the Muslim community have become more common, find Zemmour’s uncompromising anti-immigrant and anti-Islam message attractive and see in him the man who will solve the problems of security and violent Islam.
Anti-Semitism in France, which has always been at alarming levels, is in danger of escalating with Zemmour’s rise.
And not only in the right wing, with hate speech legitimized, but also among leftist groups, who start to interpret the phenomenon in a simplistic way, as if all Jews were racist. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is the leftist candidate, for example, in debate with Zemmour, claimed that his values ​​came from Judaism.
In such a way that left-wing Jews in France are orphans. On the one hand, the left accuses them of being too Jewish. On the other, the far right accuses them of being too little Christians. In this sense, what Zemmour promotes is a new grammar of anti-Semitism — not just in France, but worldwide.
France has always handled its past very poorly. Zemmour copies all of Vichy’s speeches, from the era of the French fascist and anti-Semitic government, but instead of speaking “Jew”, he says “Muslim”.
It is the most important — and complex — phenomenon of the new world right in the coming years. An extremely sophisticated figure, who has a very special place to speak, which Viktor Orbán (Hungary’s Prime Minister) doesn’t have, Donald Trump doesn’t have, and Jair Bolsonaro doesn’t have either. A dangerous figure that brings fundamental characteristics to understand what shouldn’t, but can happen from now on in the next few years.
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