While the polemicist progresses in the polls, it is Emmanuel Macron’s turn to step up against Eric Zemmour. The head of state criticized Tuesday the idea of a French identity “built on a narrowing, to first names”, aiming without naming the potential candidate in 2022, which calls for a francization of first names.
“We often ask ourselves in the political debate the question of our identity”, declared the tenant of the Elysee in a speech on the occasion of the visit of the renovation site of the National Library of France which will not be fully completed until ‘after the presidential election. “But our identity has never been built on either narrowing, or first names or forms of tension,” he commented, referring for the first time publicly to the polemicist’s proposals. Eric Zemmour explained that he wanted “to force people to give French names” because “to call your child Mohamed is to colonize France”.
Two pillars: “State and language”
The head of state had always refrained until then from commenting on the positions of the essayist, thus declaring Monday in Lyon that it was not in his role to evoke “potential” or declared candidates. “Our country, our nation was built by two institutions, the state and the language”. “A language whose epicenter today is no longer on these banks of the Seine but in doubt much more towards the Congo River basin,” he said Tuesday evening.
Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, sees the BNF as “an epicenter of our history”. He thus praised the invention of legal deposit, a model in the world, to build a common memory. “I want to pay tribute to Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande who both laid the foundations for this project,” he noted.
Sarkozy’s criticisms
On Europe 1 and Cnews, Nicolas Sarkozy also criticized Eric Zemmour Tuesday evening, according to him a “symptom of the void” of the political debate. “The pressure of a single thought is such that it ended up emptying the political debate” and this vacuum “allows excesses, extremes, all those whose excess serves as an argument, to take up all the space. », Insisted the former president.