Presidential 2022: “I thought that Eric Zemmour would make 3%”, says Robert Ménard – LCI

He didn’t think his “friend” could go that far. Invited this Thursday by Ruth Elkrief on LCI, the Right Divers (DVD) mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, said he was surprised by Eric Zemmour’s scores. In a Harris Interactive poll for the weekly Challenges published this Thursday, the polemicist qualifies for the first time in the second round of the presidential election with 17% of the vote, ousting Marine Le Pen. “No one saw it coming” its rise in the polls, he says. “I thought he would make 3%.”

The elected explains in particular his success by the tenor of his remarks. “What he says is understood, because there is cultural insecurity, there is a feeling of no longer being in the country we loved.”

However, Robert Ménard doubts that Eric Zemmour can be elected if he does not soften his speech by making it more “reassuring”. “On the basis of his positions, I have reservations”, he concedes. “This radicalism maybe allows you to get maybe 20% of the vote, but is that enough to win an election?”, he asks, comparing the position of Eric Zemmour and Jean-Marie Le Pen who was never elected despite his “good scores”.

“People, as long as they haven’t seen us at work, are wary of us. I kept telling Marine Le Pen that we had to reassure people, to tell them that it won’t be civil war tomorrow, that the suburbs weren’t going to catch fire, that all the teachers weren’t going to go on strike … “, he explains. And to ensure: “I don’t want a solution that divides, that radicalizes, that means that we can no longer talk to a certain number of people because they feel called into question.”

Candidate or not, Eric Zemmour has, according to Robert Ménard, “blow up the right”. “It’s over, the right as we knew it. We can still pretend with a congress, but everything will explode”, he believes. “I think that from all this will be born a large party of the republican right assumed, authoritarian, liberal and which dares to say that it is of the right.”