ERIC ZEMMOUR, a controversial French far-right TV presenter accused of inciting racial hatred, announced that he will run for president next spring, saying he wants to “save” traditional France from “disappearing.” In a 10-minute video posted on social media Tuesday, Zemmour sat at a table and gave a speech in front of an old-fashioned microphone that resembled General Charles de Gaulle’s famous June 1940 broadcast to Nazi-occupied France. To a Beethoven soundtrack, the video jumped to unexplained riots and CCTV footage of fighting, as well as women in headscarves, Black men on the subway, athletes kneeling and praying in the street. Zemmour said: “The time has come not to reform France, but to save her. That is why I decided to run for the presidency. ” He warned that the France “of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV” and “of Notre-Dame and village churches” was disappearing. “You feel like foreigners in your own country,” he told voters in the speech. “Immigration is not the cause of all our problems but it aggravates them all,” he declared. He added that, if elected, he would banish gender studies from French schools, slash the public debt and win back France’s sovereignty “from European technocrats and judges.” Stills from the Palace of Versailles and excerpts from films about Joan of Arc and Napoleon illustrate what Zemmour considered the former glory of France. French media reported that at least one film company is investigating the legal issue of rights to use certain footage. The son of Algerian Jewish parents who migrated to France, the 63-year-old aims to outshine National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen in next April’s election to set up a second-round duel against President Emmanuel Macron. Zemmour is due to hold his first official campaign meeting Sunday morning in Paris. Anti-fascism activists and unions had pledged to mark the occasion with a “silence Zemmour” protest. Zemmour is one of France’s best-known commentators, making his name by warning in best-selling books about the “colonization” of the country by Muslims, whose religion he views as “incompatible” with French values. Acid-tongued, intense and with two convictions for hate speech, he wants to send immigrants who “do not assimilate” back to their country of origin and ban French people from giving their children foreign-sounding first names, such as Mohammed. The former newspaper columnist with no political party and no election experience has been attacked by historians for claiming that Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain saved French Jews rather than facilitating their deportation to death camps. The French justice minister called him a dangerous racist and Holocaust denier. Human rights groups and anti-racist organizations condemned his presence on the political scene. His latest trial for incitement to racial hatred began last month after a televised speech last year when he called unaccompanied migrant children “thieves, murderers and rapists.” During a recent tour to promote his latest book on the alleged decline of the nation, Zemmour stated that immigration and Islam would destroy the country and warned of a “war of the races.” During the autographs, he claimed that the “white heterosexual man” was under threat from ethnic minorities and the so-called “gay lobby.” His official announcement of joining the presidential race came after widespread media coverage and skyrocketing opinion polls this fall – when some indicated he could make it to the final round against Macron. But polls in recent weeks have shown that his position is starting to decline. Opinion polls in September and October briefly showed him as being the best-placed candidate to topple Macron, who has yet to declare his bid for a second term but is widely expected to do so early next year. But Zemmour’s momentum appeared to fizzle in recent weeks. The latest survey put him third in the first round of the election at 14-to-15 percent, behind Macron and Le Pen. Analysts say it is Le Pen who could benefit from his entry by making her look more reasonable. Political scientist Marcel Gauchet said Zemmour’s rhetoric made Le Pen appear “l(fā)ike a normal candidate” and that his decision to campaign almost entirely on immigration showed “the growing political importance” of the issue. A photograph of him giving a middle finger with the comment “Real deep!” to a protester during a trip to Marseille last weekend was seized on by opponents as a sign his campaign was imploding. Celebrity magazine Closer also reported last week that the married father-of-three was expecting a baby with his 28-year-old chief adviser Sarah Knafo — which he denounced as an invasion of privacy, but did not deny. The exact lineup of the presidential contest will become clearer when ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans chose their candidate. The French-born son of Jewish Berbers who immigrated from Algeria in 1952, Zemmour studied at Sciences Po and began his career as a journalist, radio commentator, and author of popular books expounding his acerbic views. For the past two years the fiery polemicist has been a star commentator on CNews, a right-wing TV network created about four years ago that is often compared to Murdoch’s Fox News. He is dubbed the “Trump of France” for his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant views, which hectically warns France that it is bound to its doom as he described in one of his books “The French Suicide.” With immigration as his main bugaboo, Zemmour voices a litany of racist, sexist, and otherwise extreme views that place him at the outer edge of France’s far right. Virulently anti-feminist and homophobic, contemptuous of all forms of political correctness, Zemmour favors a restoration of the death penalty, the lifting of highway speed limits, and curbs on what he calls the “counter powers” — meaning “judges, the media, the minorities.” He warns darkly of a looming civil war and has been sanctioned multiple times by French courts for inciting racial hatred. He also has a penchant for Trump-style provocations: In a shocking gesture that drew widespread criticism last month, he trained an unloaded sniper’s rifle on a group of journalists at a security event and jokingly ordered them to “get back.” When citizenship minister Marlène Schiappa called the act “horrifying,” Zemmour dismissed her as an “imbecile.” In foreign policy, Zemmour is an ultranationalist who wants to pull France out of NATO’s integrated command and forge a cozy relationship with Russia. Aides say he values Washington as an ally but insists on being treated as an equal partner and seeks an “equilibrium” between the U.S. and the Russian state. Yet his rhetoric is often tinged with undisguised anti-Americanism. Speaking at a rally in October, for example, he called the D-Day invasion “an occupation and colonization by the Americans.” While he does not call for an outright Frexit from the EU, he wants to curtail the EU’s powers and reaffirm French sovereignty. Though he is himself a practicing Jew, Zemmour has been accused of antisemitism by prominent members of France’s Jewish community based on a series of troubling remarks and writings. Recently, he suggested that the families of the Jewish children who were murdered by an Islamist terrorist in 2012 were not good French citizens because their families had chosen to inter their remains in Israel. He has cast doubt on the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer charged with pro-German espionage and ultimately acquitted in 1906. Most troubling is his revisionist claim that the Vichy government under Philippe Pétain actually protected French Jews during the Nazi occupation, whereas Vichy’s active role in rounding up and deporting Jews to Hitler’s death camps (on French trains) is well documented. Whatever his motivations, Zemmour’s dog whistles clearly appeal to those on the far right who are unhappy with Le Pen’s rejection of the blatant antisemitism for which her father was notorious. (SD-Agencies) | 