The day after his laborious visit to Marseille, the sentence was fired: Eric Zemmour missed his presidentialization, while he must formalize his candidacy for the April 2022 poll in the next few days. “The transformation from polemicist to candidate did not happen”, asserted Marine Le Pen, candidate of the National Rally (RN), Sunday in the program “Le Grand Jury” RTL-LCI-Le Figaro. “When you want to be President of the Republic, you have to be able to keep calm, to control your ‘instinct'”, she pressed, referring to the Eric Zemmour’s middle finger, addressed to a Marseillaise and immortalized by a photographer from Agence France-Presse.

On the first day of his tour, September 17 in Toulon, the author of French suicide (2014, Albin Michel) proclaimed on stage: “I think I can inoculate the French people with my will. “ But in Marseille, he appeared in the background, his voice extinguished, his chin tucked into the scarf and his gaze shifty. The contrast was accentuated under the banter of Stéphane Ravier, who came to rent by his side the “Christian roots” of France and the joys of pétanque. As an aside, Senator RN of Bouches-du-Rhône is surprised that Zemmour has so badly organized this stage.

After two months of media pre-campaign and a dynamic poll that places him between Xavier Bertrand and Marine Le Pen, can the far-right polemicist still change his mind? “Ah, that’s a big question, almost metaphysical …”, he blurted out on Saturday before turning on his heels. His entourage looks good. “We are ready, we”, assures Olivier Ubéda, who directs its events. They, but him? Heckled, he did not show the desire to get started and his constantly rejected statement instilled doubt.

“No physical power”

The day before this trip, his friend and advisor Paul-Marie Coûteaux confided that he was “Reluctant to take the plunge”. In a letter, he begged him last week to “Change skin”. “Remember the two bodies of the king”, he repeated to him many times, in reference to this theory of medieval history on the incarnation of the State. “We have to go from the mortal body to the political body, to do this transformation, insists the very reactionary director of the review The New Curator. Eric does not have the smoothness, the natural majesty. His non-political body is a problem. He lacks distance, compunction, magnanimity, those old virtues that make a prince… He continued to do CNews. “

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