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French far-right pundit Eric Zemmour announced on Tuesday that he will run for president in next year's election, staking his claim in a video peppered with anti-immigrant rhetoric and warnings France must be saved from decline. Zemmour, 63, is the most stridently anti-Islam and anti-migrant of the challengers seeking to unseat President Emmanuel Macron in the April 2022 vote.
His formal entry into the race -- anticipated for weeks -- adds another element on the far-right to the campaign, alongside its traditional leader Marine Le Pen. But it remains to be seen if he will maintain the momentum of recent weeks. He said he had joined the race "so that our daughters don't have to wear headscarves and our sons don't have to be submissive". https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211130-far-right-pundit-eric-zemmour-announces-2022-bid-for-french-presidency.
As for the incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, he is heading into a hotly contested presidential election in France. Under pressure from the political right and the far right, he's keen to come across as a security-conscious nationalist who abhors illegal migration. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59425542
The issue of immigration is dominating political debate in the country five months before presidential elections, as candidates on the right as well as the left harden their positions. The drowning last week of 27 migrants off France’s northern coast has only added to the argument that migration must be checked. The figures, however, show that the migration situation in France is “rather ordinary, rather moderate,’’ said François Héran, a leading expert on migration who teaches at Collège de France. “We’re really not a country overrun by immigration.’’
Even then, fears that traditional French identity is threatened by Muslim immigrants from Africa — fanned for decades, either openly by the extreme right or with winks and dog whistles by others — have long consumed discussions about immigration. A series of terrorist attacks in recent years, some perpetrated by children of immigrants who grew up in France, have heightened those fears.
READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/world/europe/french-election-immigration.html