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After dominating the airwaves in the early stages of the campaign, France’s extreme-right candidate Éric Zemmour saw his presidential run falter in the home stretch. His lowly 7.1 percent tally in Sunday’s first round shut him out of the April 24 run-off. But his outsized influence on the campaign could still weigh on the final result.
All that fuss for just 7.1 percent. Veteran French journalist Laure Adler no doubt spoke for many colleagues when she voiced a “mea culpa” on Monday over the media’s treatment of Éric Zemmour’s campaign.
“As a journalist, I would like to do a mea culpa – and I think a lot of us should be concerned,” Adler said on France 5 television. “I think we played a part in the media bubble and the construction of Éric Zemmour’s candidacy.”
The media bubble ultimately failed to propel the extreme-right rabble-rouser into the second round of France’s presidential election, in which incumbent President Emmanuel Macron will once again face Rassemblement national (National Rally) candidate Marine Le Pen. But its legacy threatens to weigh on a contest that pollsters have billed as a tight race, Adler warned.
She added: “I think Éric Zemmour’s candidacy, and this name that dominated the airwaves for two months, lent credit to the normalisation of Marine Le Pen.”
A prolific writer and advocate of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, according to which liberal elites are plotting to replace French nationals of White stock with immigrants, Zemmour bossed the early stages of the presidential campaign in the raucous, aggressive and iconoclastic manner of a Donald Trump – albeit with the veneer of cultured sophistication generally expected of a French…
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Source : france24
