From pundit to president? The far-right rise of Éric Zemmour

He has been convicted for inciting racial hatred, attacked for claiming the Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain saved French Jews rather than aiding their deportation to death camps, and was last week described by the French justice minister as a dangerous racist and Holocaust denier.

- Angelique Chrisafis

But Éric Zemmour, a far-right French TV pundit, is rising so fast in opinion polls for president that one recent survey found he could make the final round of the April election and take 45% of the vote against the centrist Emmanuel Macron.

Rights groups have expressed outrage and leftwing politicians declared themselves “nauseated” by Zemmour being handed vast amounts of airtime on primetime TV and radio in the past two weeks to promote his latest book, La France N’a Pas Dit Son Dernier Mot (France Hasn’t Had Its Last Word) , which claim s that immigration and Islam will destroy the country and warn s of a “war of races”. He claims unless immigration is stopped, France will become an “Islamic republic”.

Zemmour also admires the former US president Donald Trump and regards the UK’s Brexit vote as ballast for his anti-immigration position. He says he wants to create an ultraconservative arc from the mainstream right to the far-right, harnessing voters from both low-income backgrounds and what he calls the educated “patriotic bourgeoisie”.