Who Is Éric Zemmour?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2021
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
There's a presidential election coming up in France in April 2022. In a surprise to many, recent polls show that the occupant of second place behind the incumbent president is a man who has never run for office before: Éric Zemmour. He's a veteran journalist, a provocateur and a virulent Islamophobe. Jacob Schulz sat down with Yasmeen Serhan, a staff writer at The Atlantic to talk about Zemmour’s rise. Who is he? How did he come to be so popular? Is he even going to run for president? And what about all that's happened so far in France has shades of Donald Trump?
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.8 | Oftentimes, you'll find that around the world, like political advisors do travel and do |
| 0:37.8 | work for you. |
| 0:38.8 | I mean, I think they also keep it track. |
| 0:40.4 | Like, it's not just some more who knows, but like his political advisors are likely the |
| 0:44.2 | type of people who are trained to know. |
| 0:45.9 | This is how we, you know, stay on message that we make sure we're in the conversation, |
| 0:50.4 | we're in the public debate so that all of the attention is trained on us. |
| 0:54.5 | And when he does that, it's not just ensuring that he's getting media attention. |
| 0:58.1 | It's also ensuring that all the other potential candidates are then being put in the position |
| 1:02.4 | where they have to respond to things he said and done. |
| 1:05.6 | And if that sounds familiar, that's because that was 2015 and 2016. |
| 1:09.4 | That was Trump. |
| 1:10.4 | And even if he wasn't necessarily taken seriously in the media, as I don't think Trump was |
| 1:14.8 | at least initially, he, you know, eventually was high up in the polls and continued to |
| 1:19.9 | do well and ultimately came out as the candidate. |
| 1:22.9 | I think the French press do take some more more seriously, but I don't think that that's |
| 1:28.0 | necessarily translated into them covering him any differently. |
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