Zemmour, the count of the arguments of the CSA
Audio 02:34
Eric Zemmour.
AFP - JOEL SAGET
By: Amaury de Rochegonde Follow
5 mins
The Superior council of audio-visual decided to count the speaking time of Eric Zemmour, the journalist-essayist of the channel CNews, become according to the authority an "actor of the national political debate".
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Everything is in the choice of words: an actor in the political debate and no longer simply an observer. Before the summer, when we asked the CSA about the ambiguous place of Eric Zemmour on the politico-media scene, he replied that we were not going to start quantifying the speaking time of editorial writers to pour their words into such and such. such camp. However, the far-right polemicist was already showing signs of pre-candidacy for the presidential election. We had first seen him declare that he was going "
perhaps to take action
", so as not to know the fate of this historian who regretted having stuck to words. Then, on June 18, he broadcast a video in which he laid a wreath in front of General de Gaulle's birthplace.
But above all, on June 29, Gilles Haéri, the boss of the Albin Michel publishing house had raised the doldrums by explaining that he had broken his publishing contract with Éric Zemmour because he had "
the intention to get involved in the presidential election and to make his next book a key element of his candidacy
”.
Exactly what will happen with
France has not said its last word
, the essay of the polemicist which will appear on September 16 and which is already number one in pre-order sales on Amazon.
It is also the upcoming promotion of this book throughout France that justified the suspension of his column in
Le Figaro
.
Use your program to prepare your campaign
The risk was then that Zemmour would take advantage of his daily show on CNews to prepare the ground for his campaign before declaring himself a candidate at the very last moment, as his friends had suggested. All summer, we saw the posters "Zemmour president" of a collective called "Generation Zemmour". Then the campaign accounts commission gave its approval to a political fundraising association "Les Amis d'Éric Zemmour". And finally, on September 3, the polemicist who has never denied preparing his candidacy, declared that he was ready to debate with Marine Le Pen.
It was then that his name was tested at 8% in a poll published in the
Journal du dimanche
that the CSA considered that it was necessary to count under political speeches all that related in his mouth to the political debate national.
Of course, CNews reacted by specifying that Zemmour would remain on the air, that he was a columnist and that the CSA had created a special status: that of “pre-candidate”.
As for Zemmour, he questioned the independence of the CSA from the executive power.
History, no doubt, to already stage a showdown with Macron that he will play at Ruquier this Saturday on France 2, before BFM TV.
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