This is a new symbolic rally for the far-right candidate. National Rally (RN) MEP Jérôme Rivière, who was one of the spokespersons for Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign, has joined Eric Zemmour’s team. “I chose to support Eric Zemmour”, announced Mr. Rivière to Parisian Wednesday 19 January, believing that “Marine Le Pen is not in a position to win the presidential election”.
After Guillaume Peltier, who came from the Les Républicains party, Eric Zemmour therefore recorded a new take on Wednesday with the arrival of Jérôme Rivière, who was also the head of the RN delegation within the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament. “The time that France is going through, the choice that we will have to make deserves choices of conviction”, he explained on RMC Thursday morning.
For Mr. Rivière, since the regional elections in the summer of 2021, where the RN has not won any region, the president of the far-right party “has reached a glass ceiling, which she will not be able to overcome. She knows it, and that’s why she reorganized the party last summer. “Zemmour’s candidacy is the only one capable of blowing up the cordon sanitaire between the conservatives, who were at LR, and on the other side of the populist nationals embodied by the RN who never managed to find each other”, he also added, recalling the recent rallying of Guillaume Peltier to support his point.
“vicissitudes” of a campaign
On the program, Jérôme Rivière estimated Thursday morning that Mme Le Pen “is not present enough on the issues of civilization, on the fight against the commodification of human beings, on the fight against gender theory, on pregnancy for others. On this, Eric Zemmour is present ». The elected official stated the day before that he was about to become vice-president and spokesman for the Reconquest! Party of Eric Zemmour, like the ex-LR MP Guillaume Peltier.
Jérôme Rivière says he has resigned from the party and from his post as head of the RN delegation within the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament. This departure is part of « vicissitudes » of a campaign, it was a “very sour profile”, reacted on Wednesday the entourage of Marine Le Pen. Former deputy of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party in the Alpes-Maritimes, Jérôme Rivière was also a member of the national office (extended management) of the RN. He was Marine Le Pen’s campaign spokesperson for the foreign press.
Eric Zemmour, currently behind the RN candidate in the polls, “has generated significant enthusiasm and made a courageous choice. I have a duty to make one too”, believes the MEP in The Parisian. Mr. Rivière says he does not believe “let Eric Zemmour be brutal”, as stated by M.me Le Pen. “He is sometimes radical, because he poses political terms in a raw way, but in no way brutal. He has this ability to unite that Marine Le Pen does not have. He can do what he calls “union of rights” » Come in “conservatives and populists”.
Jérôme Rivière had traveled to the United States several times for the RN, including to follow the last days of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2020. He knows the latter’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, well and had relayed on social networks the accusations of fraud by Mr. Trump, who considers that his Democratic rivals have ” Fly “ the US presidential election.