Spectator French Fash Fave FLOPS

Yesterday, the French electorate went to the polls in the first of two rounds of voting which will decide the country’s Presidency for the next five years. Despite all the abuse hurled at him by a variety of right-wing pundits in the UK, Emmanuel Macron led the field and will go into the second round of voting, to face the far-right’s standard bearer Marine le Pen, the supposedly acceptable face of The Fash. But one face of The Fash will not be there.

To the palpable disappointment of those at the increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine, and especially their fawning pundit Freddy Gray, Éric Zemmour came a distant fourth in the poll. All that promotion and no result. Worse for the Speccy, the mag expended a significant amount of its credibility in promoting Zemmour to its Anglophone audience.

As Zelo Street noted last September, the magazine had told readers “The French ‘grand’ journalist Éric Zemmour is among the most watched, provocative and frequently prosecuted writers in the country. He is now contemplating a piratical presidential challenge that could blow open next year’s presidential election”. See the bit about “frequently prosecuted”? Zemmour had three convictions. For race hatred.

How did he get those? “He recently claimed that young male migrants from Africa and the Middle East were ‘killers and rapists’”. Doing that sort of thing. Also, he’d been “decrying the ‘great replacement’ by Muslim immigrants of ‘les français de souche’ - the loaded term for those of ‘purely French heritage’”. GREAT REPLACEMENT ALERT!

Zemmour was “often described as the Tucker Carlson of CNews”. Although he is Jewish, he’s been more than willing to defend “Vichy France and its leader, Philippe Pétain”. So no surprise that Daniel Sugarman, public affairs officer for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told “I will certainly accuse the Spectator of giving a platform to a Holocaust revisionist … I will also accuse the Spectator of giving a platform to a man who said that the 4 Jewish victims of the 2012 antisemitic terror attack in Toulouse were ‘foreigners first and foremost’ because their families decided to bury them in Israel”.

And Pawel Swidlicki noted last November “Last week [Liz] Truss was at Spectator awards praising the Spectator which then published laudatory softball interview with Eric Zemmour who has been described by France's chief rabbi as an anti-Semite. Today Truss writes that ‘There is no place for anti-Semitism anywhere in the world’”. Oh dear!

Jonathan Portes observed “From Golden Dawn to Thierry Baudet to the AFD to the Sweden Democrats, what racist/fascist/far-right European political movement has the [Spectator] *not* endorsed? Responsibility for this lies not with Gray but with editor [Fraser Nelson] and Chairman [Andrew Neil]”. So it does. And what has it got them?

Zemmour will not make the second round of voting. Worse for the Speccy, its front page promoting this bigot has aged especially badly, given its use of a large capital “Z” - the same large capital “Z” that Russian armed forces have used in their invasion of Ukraine to identify their tanks and other armoured vehicles. A most unfortunate coincidence.

The Spectator’s love-in with the far right, and its open promotion of bigotry, demonstrate that its freedom of speech remains unchecked. That does not mean that establishment journalists should go anywhere near it, party invites or no. It has ventured beyond the pale.

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