PARIS — Two words, taboo for many in France because they evoke a conspiracy theory embraced by white supremacists, have been haunting the French presidential campaign.
“Great replacement” rolls off the tongue of presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, an outsider with views to the right of the far-right who has made the term the underpinning of his campaign. But when mainstream conservative presidential candidate Valerie Pecresse pronounced them at her first major rally last weekend, politicians and pundits screamed foul, saying she had crossed a red line.
The ”great replacement” is the false claim that the native populations of France and other Western countries are being overrun by non-white immigrants — notably Muslims — who are allegedly supplanting, and one day will erase, Christian civilization and its values. The claim, popularized by a French author, has inspired deadly attacks in recent years from New Zealand to El Paso, Texas.
“If I’m a candidate in the presidential election, it is firstly and above all to stop the ‘great replacement’ and to fight immigration,” Zemmour — whose upstart party is named Reconquest — told France 2 TV.
Numerous polls place Zemmour fourth among a bevy of candidates for France’s April 10 presidential vote behind poll leader President Emmanuel Macron — who has yet to formally declare his candidacy — and slightly behind far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and Pecresse. A presidential runoff will be held among the top two candidates on April 24 if no one wins outright.
Zemmour, 63, a controversial talk show pundit before entering the presidential race, has been convicted multiple times of inciting racist or religious hatred.
He has, for instance, drawn ire for falsely stating that Marshall Philippe Petain, who headed France’s collaborationist World War II Vichy government, saved Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps. Under Petain’s regime, some 76,000 French Jews were sent to camps; very few survived.
Both Renaud Camus and Zemmour base their unfounded claims that Muslims are already supplanting native French on visual indicators like Islamic headscarves. Yet less than 10% of France’s population is Muslim.
“Every day when I go to work, I say, ‘Hey, this is France,’ said Jean-Yves Camus, the far-right expert. “When Zemmour goes out from his flat … he says, ‘Wow, this is not France anymore.’”
Polls suggest that between Le Pen and Zemmour, the far-right has gained traction in France since the 2017 presidential race, when the centrist Macron beat Le Pen in a landslide in the presidential runoff. Together, the two far-right candidates represent 30% of potential French voters, the polls show, compared to up to 25% for Macron.
One reason for the ground gained by far-right ideology is France’s “difficulty adjusting to a multicultural society,” Jean-Yves Camus said.
In France, where the melting pot is based on assimilation and officials are banned from counting people by origin, “we are supposed to be equal but only if we are identical,” he said.
“There is certainly some kind of mainstreaming of many issues that were only fringe topics, let’s say 10 or 15 years ago,” Jean-Yves Camus said. “It’s not only about the great replacement … (it’s) anything that has to do with immigration, and French identity, and the roots of the French nation.”
He also cites an amorphous fear of Muslims, viewed by some as “the enemy from within,” due to several terrorist attacks carried out by French Muslim citizens. That is devastating for the nation’s Muslim population, estimated at 5 million, which is overwhelmingly peaceful but often unfairly stigmatized.
