At Mutualité, HQ of the far-right polemicist for this evening of the first round, the supporters are crying, but not too loudly: many will turn to the RN candidate in the second round, as their leader has requested.
In front of his audience, Eric Zemmour ends his campaign with his eyes wide open. Drawn lines. He sighs. Winks. Big signs like goodbyes. The game was exhilarating. He had started it by flying over the fray, credited with up to 17% in the polls. He finished fourth, at an estimated 7.2%, light years behind the leading trio Macron-Le Pen-Mélenchon. He leaves the stage.
As a final provocation, the Maurrassian had chosen the Maison de la Mutualité as his last HQ. The “Mutu”, former palace of leftists of all stripes, adopted by the SFIO in 1933 for a national congress, the rebels of May 68, Georges Marchais for meetings, up to Ségolène Royal for his investiture in 2006. Before giving in ten years ago to an event manager, who undertook to plan the place. Hanging on the wall, period photos. Georges Marchais and François Mitterrand watch the events of the evening. The communist makes a face.
Single-sex meeting
Since 6 p.m., the smiles on their faces have been furtive. A young man in a three-piece suit is “stretched like a thong”. Another wants a glass of water: he is shown the direction of the toilets. We are seized with flashes, like visions of single-sex meetings. The place is mostly full of testosterone with loafers and side stripes. Lancelot, a young thirty-year-old financial engineer, justifies his visit with words of otherness: “If everyone thinks the same, we fall into a world of robots. The richness of difference creates an emulsion, positive thoughts. You can’t think all white or all black… Uh, well, all black, all red, all the colors…”
When the screens release the results, a reproachful echo escapes from a not quite full room. A man has an orange polo shirt and a blue-white-red flag on his shoulders, so we only see him. He does not believe it: Eric Zemmour is at 7.2%. The banner becomes his handkerchief. He wets him with tears. He doesn’t want to talk. Turns around. “The French are idiots, I bugger them.”
When the name of Eric Zemmour resounds, applause resounds. They last twenty seconds, no more. The tears on some faces continue to flow. A woman in evening dress, dripping mascara: “We did not lose the war.” Overall, the low score “surprised”. We try to swallow our disappointment: “At least we are above the PS and of LR.”
The room wakes up from its torpor only when Zemmour enters the scene. Valérie Pécresse had time to be booed. Marine Le Pen is listened to attentively – we breathe a little when she mentions “equality between men and women”, not too hard. For Mélenchon, an old activist, supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen since he was 17, evokes North Korea: “That’s communism! And that’s what 20% of French people want! For the far-right candidate, who came second, he believes that he “you have to give the product a chance”, against the “right-wing talkers, to capitalists in their Sunday best” even if she “left-handed” over the years.
The man, long white beard, is interrupted by the “Erics”, thrown at full throttle. Zemmour begins his speech by chanting that “each of your voices is like the cry of a people who do not want to die”. Words from a “man from nothing” in this campaign, which has built “the largest party in France” and “does in three months what some fail to do in fifteen years”. The one who will most likely try his luck in the legislative elections calls for voting for Marine Le Pen. “I have many disagreements with [elle] but there is a man opposite who brought 2 million immigrants into France. I will not choose the wrong opponent.” At his side, Nicolas Bay, Gilbert Collard or Stéphane Ravier, who all come from the frontist party. The latter confides later: “It’s been a hideout campaign. Marine Le Pen was overprotected. She used against us the same technique of demonization that the left subjected her to.
But the truth of the evening is whispered by the high priestess of the countryside, Sarah Knafo. Sheltered from indiscreet ears, in the middle of a banquet where miniature chicken legs circulate, she discusses with an imposing man. He assures him that his cop friends, freaked out by a Mélenchon in the second round, turned to Macron or Le Pen at the last moment. She answers : “Well, maybe it’s not so bad.” The man doesn’t seem to understand. Knafo continues: “Bah Eric with 5% more…”, it was the left-wing candidate who arrived in the second round, in place of Marine Le Pen. Behind the speeches given to their constituents and on TV, the zemmouriens know it: for them, the worst of the worst has been avoided.