The ultra candidate Éric Zemmour, convicted of "provocation of racial hatred" for statements against minor migrants

The far-right French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has been sentenced this Monday to a fine of 10,000 euros for "provocation of racial hatred", for affirming in 2020 in a television program in which he worked as a polemicist that unaccompanied migrant minors are " thieves”, “murderers” and “rapists”. The man who now seeks to lead France with a markedly anti-immigrant campaign speech has described the sentence as "ideological and stupid" and has announced that he will appeal the ruling - neither the first nor the last pending, among others one for denying crimes against humanity this very Thursday—because he feels, he says, “victim of political justice.”

The facts referred to in the French ruling date back to when Zemmour was not even considering the possibility of entering the campaign, but they are reminiscent of the accusations of "rapists" and "criminals" that the American Donald Trump launched against Mexicans when announcing his candidacy in 2015. In Spain, last year, the Provincial Court of Madrid dismissed an appeal against Vox to remove some electoral posters in Madrid against migrant minors. In the posters, the image of a minor immigrant (“un mena”, it could be read) and an older woman (“your grandmother”) confronted each other, comparing the supposed public cost of supporting children without families who arrive in Spain with the average pension of a retiree.

With his sentence, the Versailles correctional court, on the outskirts of Paris, has accepted the request of the Prosecutor's Office, which had demanded for Zemmour a penalty of 100 euros per day for 100 days, with the possibility of ordering his imprisonment. if you refuse to pay. The reason is the statements against unaccompanied migrant minors that he made on September 29, 2020 on the CNews television network, where he was then working as a polemicist, and whose person in charge has also been sentenced to another 3,000 euros fine, as revealed the attorney for the civil prosecution. "They have not lost anything here, they are thieves, they are murderers, they are rapists, that's all they are," Zemmour said during a gathering about the knife attack perpetrated in front of the former headquarters of the satirical magazine

a few days before and that left two injured. As it became known at the time, the aggressor, a young Pakistani, lied about his age upon arrival in France, posing as a minor in order to benefit from some of the social aid provided for minors who arrive irregularly and alone in the country. .

Far from retracting, the ultra presidential candidate, who did not attend the reading of the sentence on Monday —and who was also absent from the trial in November— has not been slow to fight back. In a statement issued as soon as the ruling was known, he affirmed that it represents "the condemnation of a free spirit by a judicial system invaded by ideologues" and evokes a Senate report from last year that concluded that "infractions committed by young people in precarious situations they are more and more numerous, serious and violent”.

What Zemmour does not say either in his statement or in his repeated public accusations against migrants, minors or not, is that the same report also underlined that "a large majority of the criminal acts committed by foreign minors or by persons posing as therefore, they are not actually MENA [unaccompanied foreign minors] in charge of the ASE [Social Assistance to Children], but above all young people in precarious situations who present a different sociological profile”.

According to Zemmour, his judicial persecution is due to the fact that he has presented himself in the presidential elections in April.

"I have a charged judicial file because they want to demonize me, they want to silence me through justice, because I am the only candidate who raises the issue of immigration and the great replacement," he said shortly after before journalists in Paris in reference to the conspiracy theory that promotes, according to which the population with European roots is being replaced in Europe by an African and Arab population.

It is not the first time that Zemmour has been condemned for anti-immigrant or directly xenophobic statements.

In the last decade, the current presidential candidate has been brought to court fifteen times and on at least two occasions he has been firmly sentenced to a fine, both for "provocation of racial hatred" and for "provocation of religious hatred", in 2011 and 2019, respectively.

pending processes

The ultra candidate, who after a strong boost in the fall is experiencing a stagnation in the polls – the latest polls place him in fourth place in voting intentions (around 13%) – also has several pending processes. This Thursday he will be tried for denial of a crime against humanity for having stated, in October 2019 again on the CNews network, that Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime, had "saved" French Jews. The justice acquitted him in the first instance in February 2021, but the civil accusation appealed and the new trial will begin this week. Last Friday, a Paris court also set a new trial against Zemmour for May 2023, this time for aggravated defamation,for some statements he also made in 2019 against the "feminist movement" and the "LGTBI movement".

In addition, according to the press this Sunday, several film companies and personalities, including the Gaumont company and filmmakers Luc Besson and François Ozon, have taken legal action against Zemmour for having used his images without authorization in the video with which he launched his presidential campaign.

The date of the first hearing before the Paris court has been set for January 27, according to Agence France Presse.

Marine Le Pen, less extremist than Zemmour?

The irruption in the presidential race of the ultra polemicist has caused a strong shake in the field of the right and, above all, of the French extreme right dominated until then by Marine Le Pen.

The arrival of Zemmour has upset the predictions that until last summer took for granted that the second round in April would be held between the leader of the National Rally (RN) and the outgoing president, Emmanuel Macron.

Although Zemmour's initial dazzling rise has slowed in the polls, his figure has served to make Le Pen seem less extremist, although the effects of this change of image are not yet clear, a little less than three months before the appointment with the ballot boxes.

In the barometer on the RN that the Kantar Public institute carries out every year for

and Franceinfo, only 40% of French people consider Le Pen to represent a “nationalist and xenophobic extreme right” (11 points less than in 2018), compared to 64% who use that definition for Zemmour. The rejection of Le Pen is also less massive than that of Zemmour: while only 21% say they want the victory of the leader of the RN, only 8% want to see the ultra polemicist at the head of the Elysee. Even so, 50% of the French still consider Le Pen a "danger to democracy", far higher than Macron (31%) or even the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (29%), although in this Zemmour also takes the cake of dangerousness: 62% of those surveyed consider that it constitutes a danger to democracy in France.

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