Lapina Natalia Yur’evna – Sc.D. in Political Sciences, Chief Researcher, Head of the Department of Global Problems, INION RAS
In the last decade, French society has «moved to the right», especially in such matters as immigration, internal security, and the fight against crime. Mass protest movements – «yellow vests» (2018–2019), against pension reform and police arbitrariness (2023), often accompanied by riots and pogroms, – brought to the fore the demands of order and strong power. Having as a background the crisis of systemic parties and the inability of the authorities to unite French society, there was an increase of the influence of right-wing political parties, for whose representatives in the first round of the presidential elections (2022) one third of voters voted. During the presidential campaign, a new figure appeared on the political arena – journalist and essayist Eric Zemmour. A supporter of the identitarian ideology, he put forward demands for «zero immigration», the closure of borders for immigrants, and a policy of assimilation for foreigners arriving into country. Despite the fact that only 7,07% of the votes were cast for Zemmour in the first round, the politician had a great influence on the content and course of the election campaign. In 2022, thanks to Zemmur, issues of ideology, national identity, and the cultural and religious heterogeneity of society, which until recently remained out of public discussion, were placed at the center of the presidential campaign. He managed to destroy the «ideological consensus» that has developed in France in recent decades, according to which the discussion of the problems of society splits along ethnic and religious lines was prohibited. Zemmour’s speeches on issues of immigration policy, identity, law and order, become a kind of tuning fork which «reconfigured» the election campaign, forcing other candidates to speak out on these sensitive topics. The emergence of a new political actor had other consequences as well. There was a regrouping of forces on the far right flank; Zemmour managed to get around M. Le Pen on the right; the process of «de-demonization» of the «National Union» party (French: Rassemblement National, RN) was completed, and the extreme right-wing political parties ceased to be a marginal phenomenon.
France, E. Zemmour, M. Le Pen, presidential election 2022, public sentiment, immigration, identitarianism, national sovereignty.
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