Battle of the Elysee Palace: TF1 is embedded behind the scenes of the presidential campaign

Europe 1 4:28 p.m., December 6, 2021

In the

(this Monday evening at 10:55 p.m.), the TF1 teams do not only follow the presidential candidates, they also follow the teams of the candidates.

This sheds new light on the backstage of the campaign and the making of political discourse.

This Monday evening, journalists are interested, among others, behind the scenes of Eric Zemmour's campaign, where we discover and hear for the first time on TV his advisor Sarah Knafo, who contributes a lot. to the construction of its political discourse, in particular on identity issues. 

Behind the scenes of Eric Zemmour's campaign

“We did not wait for his statement last week to reconnect. There are unseen images at the heart of Eric Zemmour's campaign that we see in the documentary. We knew what we were looking for. met his teams for several weeks, and we asked them for a working session in which we see Eric Zemmour thinking about a speech with his shadow advisor, Sarah Knafo, whom we hear a lot about ", explains François-Xavier Ménage at microphone by Philippe Vandel. Before adding: "We advance with journalists' weapons. We tell them that we would like to film this sequence. We want to be the camera that can film the way it happens, the maieutics."

He cites as an example this moment in the documentary where the team followed the soon-to-be candidate Eric Zemmour to London, a complicated trip for the candidate. We see for long minutes how "a pre-campaign discourse is set up and how much they are two to think about the strategy", comments François-Xavier Ménage. "She (Sarah Knafo) is very present, especially on the front of identity ideas." he adds.

Another example: "He could not perform in the room he would have liked. This ban comes from the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Eric Zemmour talks with his team to prepare ideas for speeches. And Sarah Knafo gives him punchline ideas for the future candidate, like 'You see, Islamists who have the right to preach in parks and rent a hall, it's crazy.'

Intrusion into Marine Le Pen's strategic meetings 

In this Monday night's documentary, there is also a sequence that had never been shown, which concerns Marine Le Pen. She agreed to film her weekly strategic meetings, where the political tempo and her presidential image are working. There are a dozen around the table thinking about the arguments. So the exercise is not about staying five minutes and then leaving.

"There are times when we see the real politics being made. Exchanges not tense, but frankly very frank between the candidate Le Pen and her teams." There is also that moment when journalists followed Marine Le Pen in a walkabout. She connects selfies and gifts from activists. And she then shares with the TF1 team her happiness to be facing the French rather than facing journalists.

"It's very pleasant to move around like that. It must be said that it is objectively more pleasant than to be on television sets. It's much more fun, because you meet people, because we discuss with them, because the fight is for them, it is not for the media that we are fighting ", we hear Marine Le Pen say in the documentary.

A few minutes later, there is a press conference.

And there, change of tone, Marine Le Pen attacks Emmanuel Macron frontally.

The interest of the documentary puts these two different discourses into perspective.

Where is the left in the documentary?

In this first episode, we also see the LRs, we see the Republic on the march with Stanislas Guérini, the RN, Eric Zemmour. We have to wait the last 13 minutes to see two left-wing candidates, Anne Hidalgo and Yannick Jadot. François-Xavier Ménage justifies this choice by the dense topicality of the right and the extreme right these last weeks of campaign. “We had an LR congress with a winner this weekend. Obviously, there was a challenge for us to be able to tell that. We also have a speech by Eric Zemmour which was omnipresent during the month of November. not put that at the end of the documentary ", explains François-Xavier Ménage.

"In the second part, we already have appointments, interviews and sequences setting with left-wing candidates. There will not be a rebalancing, but we will do things differently for episode 2", adds he does.

He says he sticks to the basic principle of giving everyone a fair say.

"At the end of the four episodes, we will get a panoptic view of what happened. But it is true that we cannot give an exact word to each of the 12, 13, 14 candidates because otherwise, it becomes difficult to tell anything, "he concludes.

The battle of the Elysée is tonight for the first number, at 10:55 pm on TF1.