Falling in the polls, the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour opted for an even more exacerbated radicalism by proposing Monday evening a ministry of “remigration”, a sulphurous concept borrowed from identities, some of whom are present in his entourage.
If elected, the candidate Reconquest! promises to “make a million” foreigners leave again in five years, thanks to “charters”, and to see “with the leaders of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia how we can organize this”.
It targets “illegals, foreign delinquents and criminals and foreigners on file”, and claims a “measure of consistency and firmness”.
The only presidential candidate to take up the conspiracy theory of the supposed “great replacement” of European populations by non-European immigrants, he endorses with “remigration” a new demand from the radical far right and the writer Renaud Camus.
The expression did not appear in its initial program.
“No taboo”
“You shouldn’t be afraid of words that upset a small (journalistic) community. There is no radicalization”, but “a determination”, he claimed yesterday, Tuesday March 22, 2022 in the morning, during a trip to Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis).
According to two pillars of the campaign, the proposal was blown by the former LR Guillaume Peltier, also passed through the youth movement of the National Front, then the parties of Bruno Mégret and Philippe de Villiers.
And it causes internal tugging. “Leading executives were not notified before the announcement. They didn’t really appreciate it”, slips a member of Reconquest!, while Eric Zemmour assures that his rally Marion Maréchal was well associated with this decision.
The researcher Marion Jacquet-Vaillant (Paris II) explains in her thesis that the term “remigration appears from 2011 in identity networks, and more regularly from 2014”.
These far-right groups use it in a broader sense than Eric Zemmour, since they advocate “the return to their countries of origin of a majority of non-European immigrants”, and not only foreigners.
“In March 2014, the Identitaires marched behind a banner “Immigration-Islamization, Demain la Remigration”; (…) on November 15, they organize the Assises de la Remigration, a day subtitled “From the great replacement to the great return”, describes Marion Jacquet-Vaillant.
Participating in this meeting are some executives from Eric Zemmour’s campaign today, such as the former Bloc identitaire Damien Rieu, who leads the digital response cell of the presidential candidate, or his adviser, enarque and former megretist, Jean-Yves Le Gallou.
“They will leave”
Several identities appear in his entourage. Thais d’Escufon, the former spokesperson for Génération Identitaire, a small group dissolved in March 2021 because of its xenophobic activism, expressed its support for him.
Grégoire Tingaud, a former megretist close to the identitarians, is responsible for coordinating the regional referents of Reconquête!.
With Eric Zemmour today, the defector of the RN Stéphane Ravier had proposed the creation of a “High commissioner for remigration”, without being tapped on the fingers by Marine Le Pen at the time.
And the idea, without the word itself, was present at the National Front when Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party demanded “the inversion of migratory flows” or launched slogans such as “when we arrive, they will leave”.
The former polemicist CNews takes up this expression as he falls in the polls, which place him from 3e at the 5e place, between 9 and 13% of voting intentions in the first round, while Marine Le Pen, between 16 and 20%, remains in second position behind Emmanuel Macron.
The RN candidate does not envisage such a ministry but intends to expel the same categories as Eric Zemmour: illegal immigrants, foreign delinquents and criminals, foreign S files.
She said in the evening on BFMTV to be in “profound disagreement” with the concept at its origin aiming to “remove French nationality from those who had obtained it”, but said not to understand “the new perimeter” envisaged by Eric Zemmour.
When Marine Le Pen speaks of “purchasing power”, Eric Zemmour maintains his strategy of anti-immigration radicalism and the opening of the “Overton window”, named after the inventor of this concept of discourse theory, which makes acceptable in public opinion theories that were not so until then.
Next Sunday at the Trocadéro in Paris, he hopes for the arrival of tens of thousands of people for an outdoor meeting, in order to reassure supporters who are beginning to doubt the chances of their champion.