Tribune. From Saturday 11 to Tuesday 14 December, Éric Zemmour, candidate for the French presidential election, is in Armenia. He is the author of First sex (Denoël 2006), on the devirilization of society, French suicide (Albin Michel. 2014, in which he seeks in particular to rehabilitate Marshal Pétain, or the French destiny (Albin Michel 2018), where he defends the thesis of the invasion of France by immigrants. To justify his racism and xenophobia, Eric Zemmour does not hesitate to distort history, insinuating that the Nazis were never as intolerant as the Muslims; he defends the heritage of Marshal Pétain who would have “Saved from French Jews” – omitting the fact that many Jews were stripped of their French nationality before being sent to the camps.
His race theory creates a hierarchy between what he considers to be the good ones and the bad ones immigrants. Armenians seem to find favor in his eyes: two Armenians, Charles Aznavour and Henri Verneuil, are quoted in his speech announcing his candidacy, Armenians are close to his campaign team, and he, during the war, publicly sided with it. ‘Armenia… But what is it really?
During the adoption in France of the law penalizing the denial of genocides, including the genocide of the Armenians, for which Erdoğan had threatened France with diplomatic reprisals, Zemmour had adopted a resolutely pro-Turkish position, by assimilating such a law to one “Memory obsession”. Did he not compare this memorial law to a logic of the inquisition? making victims of the genocide the executioners of their own executioners? According to him, the fight against negationism would be purely “Electoralist” and “Dangerous for freedom of expression”.
Obtain the voice of the Armenians of France
So why is Eric Zemmour, hostile to the criminalization of the denial of the genocide of the Armenians, the Pontic Greeks and the Assyrians, making his first trip as a candidate to Yerevan? To obtain, no doubt, the votes of the Armenians of France, as will soon seek to do besides another candidate of the right, Valérie Pécresse, who also plans a first trip, very soon, in Armenia.
Eric Zemmour does not come to Armenia to speak to Armenians. It comes with the aim of collecting the ballots from certain Armenians in France who, after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, started by Azerbaijan, a satellite of Turkey, in 2020, must face their own hatred. They hear in the candidate’s speech a response that could seem comforting, to a call for help made repeatedly to an international community that has never intervened. In doing so, Eric Zemmour instrumentalizes the cause of the Christians of the East, which has become a preserve of the extreme right, even though this extreme right sees in these Christians only a means of justifying its Islamophobia.
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