Marseilles. When the Zemmour machine stalls
Zemmour is not welcome in Marseille
Well aided by an armada of highly concentrated media (in a few hands), the one who has not yet been declared a candidate has spent a large part of the media space since September. Logical consequence of this spotlight, the entry into the presidential campaign of the polemicist, who is still not a candidate, was done under the best hospices and his rise in the polls, which saw him follow the president- candidate Macron, seemed irresistible.
In recent weeks, the likely candidate has started to suffer some setbacks. Its movements tend in particular to increasingly oppositions. This week, his visit to Marseille thus appeared as a persistent failure. A small group of activists awaiting him at Saint Charles station on Friday, he preferred to get off his train in Aix to avoid this welcoming committee. But despite all precautions, his two days in the Marseille city are summed up in a walk in step and under good escort during which he was not spared by the Marseillais he met.
In a district of Le Panier with streets deserted by the inhabitants, he does not know what to answer to a passer-by who addresses him, in these terms: “My name is Mohamed, so you consider that I am not French? “. Saturday, this time it is a woman who gives him a vengeful finger of honor to which he finds nothing else to answer than “and very deep!” »By reproducing the gesture. When he left Marseille on Saturday, he rebelled at Saint Charles station, it was under boos that he got on the train. Visibly affected by this express passage in the city which embodies the “cosmopolitanism” which he dedicates to gemonies, Zemmour did not fail to say that “Marseille is the anti-example of what is needed in France”.
However, if this failed visit is causing so much talk, it is because it is part of a difficult sequence for the far-right polemicist. In Bordeaux, where a rally against his coming was organized in London where he was refused at the last moment the prestigious room he had reserved with the Royal Institution and where he finally had to organize his son meeting at the Ibis hotel. To this disappointment was added a new refusal, by the city and the canton of Geneva, to put at its disposal a public room, while a demonstration bringing together more than a thousand people was also organized against its arrival. Episodes which add to a campaign which, more in general, seems to be marking time.
Zemmour facing the difficulties of the campaign
Zemmour’s heckled passage in Marseille on November 26 and 27 is part of a political sequence that could mean a form of return to reality for the polemicist, more accustomed to TV sets and Parisian salons than to the rigors of a political campaign. . The snub wiped in Marseille is in fact added to the difficulties encountered by his campaign team, after all little experienced, facing the mountain represented by the presidential race. The conquest of the 500 sponsorships of mayors is thus far from the walk of health for the candidate as has already been echoed in the press. Similarly, we learned last week that it had been released by the financier Charles Gave, one of the main patrons and support of the polemicist.
At the same time, his poll scores are starting to falter and he is now being overtaken by Marine Le Pen. If the polls at such a distance from the first round of the presidential election today have just as little value as at the beginning of September, we could see a more realistic readjustment of voting intentions, the representativeness of the very first polls having, moreover, been serious questioning.
Despite these difficulties, the threat it poses to workers, democratic rights and minorities is still there. It is also undeniable that Zemmour was able to attract a part of the far-right youth disappointed by Marine Le Pen and awaken the attention of substantial fringes of the electorates of the Republicans and the National Rally, paving the way for political recompositions to the right. In addition, Zemmour played a clear role in the rightization of the campaign, pushing the cursor of xenophobia and racism a little further to the right and paving the way for the most reactionary one-upmanship, from LREM to Republicans to the debris. of the Socialist Party like Arnaud Montebourg.
It is clear that “the” Zemmour meteorite, propelled by the media, and which helped to upset the pre-established scenarios for the presidential election, loses its splendor after barely a few months. While it may very well be that this stormy sequence is only momentary and that his campaign starts afresh, the Marseille episode reminds us that Zemmour’s rise is resistible and that it would be wrong to deprive ourselves of fighting everywhere. step by step against its hate speech and those who propagate it. A fight which implies, as such, to mobilize against Zemmour, but also against all the racist, reactionary and security policies of which the government and the right are pillars as shown by the laws “separatism” or “security. global ”and more broadly the entire five-year term.