Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He publishes
How are the policies dead ?, The great malaise of power
(ed. Du Cerf, November 4, 2021).
Eric Zemmour was expected three times: on his ability to mobilize, on his ability to inhabit the candidate's body, on his willingness to develop a program and a plan. The exercise of the mobilization of troops, personal moult and programmatic flesh has served its purpose. To be convinced of this, it suffices to listen to the few takes he left to his various and varied oppositions. The form was there because it was primarily rhetorical and non-communicative, inhabited and unclothed. The stage has been set, the appointment held, which no doubt in no way prejudges the future, but rather targets the credibility of its candidacy at the level of its main competitors. The rite of passage was successful; that was the essential question,that which conditioned for Eric Zemmour the possibility of remaining in the game, not only, but to aspire to compete in it with some chances of success.
The sometimes muddled grape-shot of the polemicist has thus been replaced by a more political ordering.
Arnaud Benedetti
The great skill of the now candidate will have been not to draw up the act of lack of decades of political life - which he nevertheless did again with unfeigned gluttony - but to articulate a constructed argument whose objective was , if not to be convincing, but to catch the light of attention. This was done by rising to the rank of orator able to thrill a crowd, failing to still master it like the best tribunes. The service pierced through the upstream work and the acquisition of the classic codes of the oratory school as it could still be transmitted under the Third Republic: the voice was calm, the gestures more coordinated than usual, the phrasing less nervous, more concise sentences,the silences placed where it is necessary to keep in breath and punctuate the speech.
Read alsoApplication video: "Éric Zemmour reactivates a literary and historical France"
The other completion of the metamorphosis in politics of the ex-journalist operated on the mechanics of argumentation: deconstruction of the roughness (racism, sexism) which pursues him, establishment of the diagnosis of a France in his eyes just as downgraded as replaced, unfolding of the project with a timely or opportunistic opening (depending on) on the economic and social question, designation of the main adversaries (the left, Valérie Pécresse, Emmanuel Macron).
It will have relaunched itself, which moreover will have partly obscured the effect of the investiture of Valérie Pécresse by the Republican activists, thereby accentuating the pressure on the strong right wing of the government right.
Arnaud Benedetti
The sometimes muddled grape-shot of the polemicist has thus been replaced by a more political ordering. Its function was to address on the one hand the camp of the whole right in order to aggregate it even within its borders prohibited by the double heritage which is as Mitterrandian as it is Chiraquian and on the other hand to speak to the popular classes, an apparently dead angle. until now of Zemmourian sociology.
It remains to decipher the potential impact of a moment come to conclude a week of announcements to the French, competing in the media by the designation of the candidate of the Republicans. Notwithstanding the weakness of his political support, Éric Zemmour will excuse the fact of having tied up in Villepinte the risk of demonetization that has hovered over his offer for a few days. It will have relaunched itself, which moreover will have partly obscured the effect of the investiture of Valérie Pécresse by the Republican activists, thereby accentuating the pressure on the strong right wing of the government right.
Tactically well done, politically solid on its fundamentals, disrupted in the media nevertheless by clashes, the Villepinte meeting will have finally aroused another halo of impressions: the sincerity of the man decried in a confrontation where the suspicion of inauthenticity weighs on the Most of the competing brands.
In itself, this perhaps does not guarantee in any way the efficiency to come, but will comfort those most convinced of having found their providential leader to restore a certain idea of a golden age to their disappeared eyes - two figures major according to the great historian Raoul Girardet of political mythology ...
