A “French Guantanamo” where terrorists would be detained even after completing their prison sentence. Expelling from France all foreign nationals who committed a crime. Charging criminals for prison residence. Holding popular referenda on controversial bills to avoid “allowing the Constitutional Council to weaken them and deprive the French people of the strong policies they truly want”. Barring all foreign relatives of French citizens from moving to France for a minimum of five years. Overruling European Court of Justice decisions when they impinge on French sovereignty. Bringing order and discipline into French schools.

On and on it goes. It’s hard not to flinch at maverick presidential candidate Eric Zemmour’s far-Right policy prospectus, wouldn’t you say?

Except that all those proposals were included in the platforms of the main candidates for the centre-Right Républicain nomination: Nice MP Eric Ciotti, Michel “You will pay for Brexit” Barnier, and even Valérie Pécresse, the supposedly middle-of-the-road Paris Region president who won in the runoff at last weekend’s party conference. 

What they show is that, even before he gave a rousing speech on Sunday night after a couple of weeks of flagging poll numbers, Eric Zemmour has already changed the fundamentals of the 2022 French presidential race.

Emmanuel Macron himself, though he denies it, has nabbed a few new measures from the man he refuses to call his rival, such as stopping dole payments for anyone “not looking for work seriously”, or the programme of six new nuclear plants that he launched only a month ago. As the French Left crumbles to single-digit numbers, the battle for the soul of France is being fought out on the Right.

Zemmour’s name has become a shorthand for “Fascist, racist and dangerous to know” for every mainstream columnist in the Paris bubble. His rapid rise in the polls of voting intentions (from 3 per cent voting in the first round to 18 per cent in early November, briefly overtaking Marine Le Pen) drove them to new heights of fury. Examples of Zemmour Derangement Syndrome abound – and the election is still four months away.

When Le Z flunked a primetime television interview last week, the gloating could have heated two floors of the Eiffel Tower. His followers were derided as racist, far-Right oiks, nostalgic for the good old days of the Vichy regime. There was no way he could win. 

This will sound familiar to anyone who followed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Zemmour, a slight, cultured and literate polemicist who has written 18 books, many of them best-sellers, has little in common personally with The Donald – he does self-deprecation, for instance, with a twinkle in his eye.

Yet his ideas and the electrifying effect he has had on swaths of the French electorate who feel ignored by the Paris elites have the same resonance here as Trump did in the United States. Those elites also seem to have forgotten the prime lesson of Donald Trump’s rise: that, like Antaeus, the more Zemmour is deliberately tripped, the stronger his appeal becomes.

For years, Zemmour has been battling wokeness and what he relentlessly calls le politiquement correct in his Le Figaro column, his books, his television talk show, and now in his rallies. He does this wittily, piling in quotes from 18th-century philosophers and 19th-century historians.

His culture is somewhat frozen in aspic and his oratory has the rousing cadences of Third Republic politicos; but unlike Macron, who is also fond of literary quotes in his long addresses to the nation, he manages not to make this sound contemptuous of his audience. Rather, he sounds as if he were sharing old family tropes and far-off memories of the great days of France’s past, ones that his fans delight in sharing.

On Sunday at Villepinte, a cavernous exhibition hall near Charles de Gaulle airport, where Zemmour had to relocate for reasons both of security and space, he hammered (and hammed up) his version of Make France Great Again.

By now, his skeleton staff has learnt the lessons of Trump: videos of Zemmour’s summer and autumn “book tour” across France (he only officially joined the presidential race last week) showed a kaleidoscope of eager fans queuing for hours, in long lines, in front of the venues he was to speak before signing his book. 

“Everything was already sewn up,” Zemmour joked. “This election would be a re-run of 2017, with the same candidates and the same result – except for a small grain of sand in the machine.” The audience roared. “No, not me – the grain of sand is you. We can change it all,” and they roared again.

So far, all projections show Zemmour losing against Macron in the runoff; and he may not even reach that. But the Zemmour revolution has already changed the French political landscape.