Passe below 10% in the polls, the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour on Saturday called on LR voters, whom he considers “betrayed”, to vote for him, before being released later from a city stadium where he had invited himself without warning of the presence of cameras.
“Republican voters have been betrayed for a very long time. We saw it again in the last regional elections and it will continue, during the first round of the presidential election. I tell them, Republican voters, don’t get the wrong vote”, a- he repeated in front of journalists during a trip to Marseille.
“By voting for Valérie Pécresse, they will vote Emmanuel Macron”, he added, taking up one of his favorite angles of attack against the LR candidate.
Éric Zemmour was speaking at the end of a brisk visit to a wild flea market in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille, in the very popular northern districts of the city, which he wanted to oppose to a traditional market where he had previously visited in Plan-de-Cuques, a pretty town north of Marseille.
“I wanted to show that. After a charming market, a real Marseille market (in Plan-de-Cuques, editor’s note), I wanted to show another Marseille market. Here we imported the third world and we have the third world” , he said in front of this market of “biffins” (Editor’s note: ragpickers in its popular sense) where sellers have objects, odds and ends, on the floor, for next to nothing.
For him, this market, where the “biffins” are often undocumented and the poorest migrants from Marseille, illustrates “the great replacement”, a conspiratorial concept which denounces an alleged substitution of white European and Christian populations by immigrants from color.
Using very violent terms, he felt that it was necessary to “clean it up physically, clean up these people who do all this trafficking, send them back where they come from, because most of them are illegals”.
Asked whether he used the term “Kärcher” used by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and taken up by Valérie Pécresse, he replied: it takes “more than + Kärcher +”.
Mr. Zemmour’s day continued with a dialogue in front of the press with a Reconquête! in a housing estate in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille. This man, Marc Estournet, explained that he owned an apartment that had been squatted on multiple occasions.
In the middle of the afternoon, the candidate took part in an indoor football match at the ZS sports complex in Aix-en-Provence, created by football star Zinedine Zidane. In shorts and jersey, Mr. Zemmour started a match with local supporters before the game was abruptly stopped by center officials, unhappy with the presence of many cameras.
In great confusion and with palpable tension, one of them notably argued “not being aware of all this”, asking everyone to “get out”. “We weren’t told it was for a meeting,” said a man posing as a site employee.
The candidate and his team eventually complied.
“It’s called the refusal to sell”, was criticized in the entourage of Mr. Zemmour. “It’s not the cameras that bothered but Eric Zemmour. It’s akin to discrimination,” added the same source, ensuring that he did not come to this establishment “to seek controversy”.
The land had been rented in the name of local support from Eric Zemmour. Contacted several times, the ZS complex did not respond to AFP’s requests.
02/04/2022 21:45:47 – Marseille (AFP) – © 2022 AFP
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