After months of speculation, Mr. Zemmour, an anti-immigration writer and right-wing television star, said he was running in the presidential elections next year to “save” France.
PARIS — Éric Zemmour, a polarizing far-right writer and television star, announced on Tuesday that he was running for French president in elections next year, ending months of speculation over a bid that upended the race before he had even made it official.
Mr. Zemmour, 63, is a longtime conservative journalist who rose to prominence over the past decade, using prime-time television and best-selling books to expound on his view that France was in steep decline because of Islam, immigration and leftist identity politics, themes he returned to in his announcement.
“It is no longer time to reform France but to save it,” Mr. Zemmour said in a video with dramatic overtones that was published on social media, conjuring images of an idealized France and then warning about outside forces that threatened to destroy it.
He has fashioned himself as a Donald J. Trump-style provocateur lobbing politically incorrect bombs at the French elite establishment — saying, for instance, that the law should require parents to give their children “traditional” French names — and rewriting some of the worst episodes from France’s past. He has been charged with inciting racial or religious hatred several times over his comments, and twice convicted and fined.
Mr. Zemmour spoke over 1950s footage full of men in hats and vintage Citroën cars, contrasted with recent clips of crowded subways, crumbling churches, burning cars and violent clashes with the police.
“You feel like a foreigner in your own country,” Mr. Zemmour said, reading from notes at a desk in front of old bookshelves in a way that seemed intent on replicating Charles de Gaulle’s posture when he issued a call to arms against Nazi Germany from London in June 1940.
Mr. Zemmour said that he was running “to prevent our children and our grandchildren from experiencing barbarity, to prevent our daughters from being veiled and our sons from being subdued.”
He accused the elites — journalists, politicians, judges, European technocrats — of failing France, which he said was represented by a long list of illustrious men and women, including Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon.
“We will not be replaced,” added Mr. Zemmour, who has espoused the theory of a “great replacement” of white people in France by Muslim immigrants — a conspiracy theory that has been cited by extremists in several mass shootings.
The announcement, after months of barely veiled hints that Mr. Zemmour intended to run, surprised no one. It also came after the yet-to-be-declared candidate had endured a dip in the polls and a series of setbacks in recent days — including a disastrous visit to Marseille, in southern France, that ended with him flipping off a protester. The vulgar gesture gave ammunition to critics who say Mr. Zemmour is not fit to be president.
“One may have doubts as to his ability to represent our country and serve in its highest office,” Gabriel Attal, a French government spokesman, told Europe 1 radio on Tuesday.
Mr. Zemmour has already reshuffled the political calculus for several candidates in the presidential elections, which will be held in April next year.
French presidential elections use a two-round system, with the top two candidates in the first round advancing to a runoff. Recent polls have put Mr. Zemmour in third place, with roughly 14 to 15 percent support, behind President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party, who met in the runoff of the last presidential election in 2017.
Even so, Mr. Zemmour has drawn in some of Ms. Le Pen’s supporters with his hard-line stance on immigration and identity. He has also pushed Les Républicains, France’s traditional conservative party, further to the right. The party is expected to pick its own candidate this week.
Mr. Zemmour’s latest book, “France Has Not Said Its Last Word Yet,” which he released in September to mark his unofficial entry into the presidential race, has sold more than 250,000 copies.
Some of his books have contained incendiary statements about women and minorities. They have also contained historical inaccuracies as Mr. Zemmour attempted to clear France of wrongdoing in some of the worst episodes of its past, including in World War II and Algeria’s war for independence from France.
Mr. Zemmour is the son of parents from Algeria, and he styles himself as a defender of France’s Christian civilization against the influence of Muslim immigrants. But he himself is Jewish, and his repeated attempts to rehabilitate France’s collaborationist government and its leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, have been condemned in vigorous terms by leaders of the French Jewish community, even as some Jews have identified with his anti-Islam message.
Olivier Faure, the head of France’s Socialist Party, quipped on Twitter that Mr. Zemmour had used “De Gaulle’s microphone but Pétain’s speech” for his announcement.
“Beethoven’s music but the wrong notes of a fantasized past for a caricatured present,” he added, referring to the soundtrack Mr. Zemmour used in Tuesday’s video.
Mr. Zemmour has excelled as a right-wing television pundit deploying virulent nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. In 2019, he joined CNews, a Fox-style news network, which provided a platform for him to express his ideas to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Mr. Zemmour experienced a rapid rise in the polls over the past few months, fueled by feverish media coverage of his latest book tour, but he has stumbled in recent weeks.
Several supporters, including a key French financier who had lent him money, have distanced themselves, describing his campaign as disorganized and amateurish.
Mr. Zemmour is not backed by a powerfully established political force, like Mr. Trump was with the Republican Party, and it remains unclear whether he can gather the official support of 500 elected representatives — a requirement to run for president in France.
Some recent moves have also cast doubt on Mr. Zemmour’s ability to handle the challenges and pressures of the campaign trail.
He was widely criticized for making political statements to journalists in front of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks there, and in Marseille, he was heckled by protesters and was photographed flipping off a woman who had made the same gesture toward him.
“He has a lot of qualities as a polemicist, a lot less as a presidential candidate,” Ms. Le Pen, the far-right leader, told Sud Radio on Tuesday, accusing Mr. Zemmour of being “disconnected” from the French working class and of dividing voters. “If you want to be president, you have to unite.”
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