The head of France’s Réconquête Party, Éric Zemmour, says Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party (RN) made a mistake by voting down Michel Barnier as prime minister in the centre-right government.
The toppling of the government opened the door for the more left-leaning François Bayrou to become PM, he said
Speaking to French news channel BFMTV on December 16, Zemmour said: “The RN has shot itself in the foot [with the December 4 vote of no confidence].”
“When I see this situation, I get scared and angry.”
After Barnier’s government was brought down, President Emmanuel Macron quickly chose Bayrou as new Prime Minister, who is more to the Left than his predecessor.
According to Zemmour: “François Bayrou is Emmanuel Macron before Emmanuel Macron,” claiming he invented “Macronism” before Macron himself.
The Réconquête Party leader said that since the 1990s, when the Treaty of Maastricht was signed, both the centre-left and the centre-right had pursued the same political agenda and Bayrou had tried to rally both sides behind him.
Zemmour quoted Philippe Séguin, the late former statesman, who once said: “The Right and the Left are two retailers with the same wholesaler, Europe.”
Zemmour claimed Bayrou and Macron were striving to unite the so-called centre.
He also commented on the murder of two young people by migrants: “As if France doesn’t have billions of debt, as if the [2022] murder of Lola never happened, or the [2023] murder of Thomas at Crépol [Drôme],” he said.
“I want to say that there has been an evolution and people like them [Bayrou and Macron] act like there hasn’t. And I’m sorry about that. We are back in 2017, at the source of Macronism”.
François Bayrou, c’est Emmanuel Macron avant Emmanuel Macron.
Sa nomination nous ramène aux sources du macronisme, comme s’il n’y avait pas eu 1000 milliards de dette en plus, comme s’il n’y avait pas eu Lola et Thomas.
Cela me désole : la classe politique est en décalage avec… pic.twitter.com/auvCcTxBja
— Eric Zemmour (@ZemmourEric) December 16, 2024
Zemmour said France had fallen back to the system of the Fourth Republic of France’s past, with a weak executive and a strong legislature, marked by chronic instability.
This has lead to “impotence”, he said, “because governments are no longer dealing with the existential problems of the French”.
In such circumstances, he added, “Politicians are more concerned with their careers than the interests of France and the French.”
“It is this political circus that disgusts the French.”
French President Emmanuel Macron is due to meet national political leaders to discuss forming a “government of general interest” but has excluded the National Rally and La France Insoumise from talks. https://t.co/OU8se186lk
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) December 10, 2024
