After dreaming of the second round in the fall, Eric Zemmour suddenly fell back to earth on Sunday evening, given in fourth position around 7% of the vote, with the historic stampede of LR Valérie Pécresse as a consolation prize.
Obviously moved in front of his supporters gathered at the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris, the far-right candidate called on his “voters to vote for Marine Le Pen”, in the name of the fight once morest immigration. However, he had assured throughout the campaign that his RN rival had “no chance” of winning once morest Emmanuel Macron.
In the room, tears, regrets and “shocked” activists, like Tanguy David, a young supporter already used to TV shows.
Old veteran of the “right outside the walls”, Paul-Marie Couteaux is sorry for a “rachitic” score for the candidate Reconquest!. “It’s the consequence of inexperience. There were too many young people, often friends of Sarah (Knafo)”, the companion and strategist of Eric Zemmour, he slips to AFP.
But “LR is dead”, he continues to console himself, while Valérie Pécresse is booed.
If he mobilized his troops in packed meetings, Eric Zemmour did not manage to “overturn the table”, nor to disrupt the announced duel between Emmanuel Macron and Marine le Pen.
Convicted several times in the past for inciting racial hatred, the former CNews polemicist has not deviated from his radical line by entering politics: he is the only candidate to have campaigned on the conspiracy theory of “great replacement” of European populations by a population of foreign origin or to say that Islam and Islamism are “the same thing”.
– “A bath of shit” –
A series of controversies punctuated his presidential adventure – a middle finger to an opponent in Marseille, violence at the Villepinte meeting in early December, “Macron Assassin” at the Trocadéro at the end of March – preventing him from correcting a degraded image in the surveys.
“There was no campaign. It was hyperdemonization, he was soaked in a bath of shit”, launches the Marseille senator Stéphane Ravier, defector of the RN.
The war in Ukraine was a turning point, with a plummeting sound since the end of February. The positions of the candidate on the Ukrainian refugees, whom he preferred to see welcomed in Poland rather than in France, caused differences in his camp, in particular in the conservative Catholic fringe.
Some have also criticized the omnipresence of Sarah Knafo.
“She very clearly has enormous weight in the campaign, but she is not a political commissar”, nuance a framework.
Camp Zemmour will have chained symbolic stagings, at Mont-Saint-Michel or Trocadéro, and highlighted rallies such as that of LR Guillaume Peltier in January, RN Nicolas Bay in February and the niece of Marine Le Pen , Marion Maréchal, at the wrong time in March.
But without managing to reverse the trend, or to attract other heavy LRs.
– “Febrility” –
Started very early, the adventure also ended in “fatigue” and a certain “excitement” when traveling, concedes a member of the team.
At the RN, we savor. “A presidential election is not a fan club and it is not done on the fly”, underlines Philippe Olivier, adviser and brother-in-law of Marine Le Pen.
The “Demonstration for all (movement opposed to the marriage of homosexual couples), they march to the cannon. They are estimable people, clean”, but “it is a militant environment, not representative of France”, he loose .
Reconciliation of the two camps will not be an easy task, even if the activists promise an “Anything but Macron” and the polls suggest a postponement of almost 80% of the voters of Reconquest! to the RN in the second round.
The executives who left the ship Le Pen, “we will never forgive them”, launched the MEP RN Jean-Lin Lacapelle at the end of March.
What future for Eric Zemmour’s party, which claims more than 120,000 members? The young movement has an appointment in June for delicate legislative elections. Eric Zemmour lip serviced a possible candidacy, without specifying where.
“I am determined to continue the fight,” he said.