The far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour said on Friday January 21 to maintain his remarks on Marshal Pétain “Saviourof Jews, believing they havehistorically correct“, the day after the rejection of the request for dismissal of his trial for contesting a crime against humanity.
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The decision of the court of appeal will be given after the presidential election on 10th and 24th April next. The ex-star columnist of CNews had been released in February 2021, after having argued in 2019 that Marshal Philippe Pétain had “Safe» French Jews during the Second World War. The court considered that these remarks had been made “point-blank during a debate on the war in Syria“.
“political maneuver”
Asked by nice morning at the start of a two-day visit to the Alpes-Maritimes to find out if he stood by his words, Eric Zemmour replied: “I always stand by my words and I know that I am historically right“.
“Now it’s not the subject of the presidential election, and I can clearly see the political maneuver“, he continued. “They want to do the trick of François Fillon to me“, he estimated, in reference to the ex-prime minister of Nicolas Sarkozy who had been dismissed from the first round of the presidential election of 2017 in the midst of legal disputes.
For Eric Zemmour, “we want to steal the election from the French and we want to use justice to ostracize one of the main candidates in the presidential election“. “It’s all sewn with white thread“, he added, believing that justice is “exploited by associations, by the power” and “the prosecution is obviously under the orders of Mr. (Eric) Dupont-Moretti“, the Minister of Justice.
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Eric Zemmour’s lawyer, Olivier Pardo, demanded that his client’s appeal trial be postponed after the second round of the presidential election for “reasons for serenity“. “Opinion debates must take place in the political arena, they must not occupy the courtroom“, he argued. The far-right candidate, whose campaign is experiencing a downturn after disputed remarks on the care of disabled children, is in the Alpes-Maritimes on Friday in Menton and Antibes, before a meeting on Saturday in Cannes, where he hopes to bring together 4,000 people at the Palais des Victoires.