French author, polemicist, anti-liberal thinker, and now presidential candidate Éric Zemmour turned heads earlier this week when he suggested that the U.S. foreign policy establishment, through its escalation of the tensions along the Ukraine-Russia border, is seeking to divide Europe against itself.
In his statements, which came on Sunday during an interview on France 5’s programme “C Dans L’air,” Zemmour not only called on the Élysée to seek out friendly relations with Moscow but also urged it to stop acting as a “tool of the United States,” which he insisted is trying to pit European nations against one another for its own foreign policy establishment’s benefit, the French-language African news outlet Actu Cameroun reports.
“The U.S. is trying to divide Russia from France and Germany, and every time they get closer to each other, the Americans find a way to divide them,” Zemmour said, adding that if he were president, France would pivot away from American influence and lift all sanctions presently being leveled against Russia.
“The Americans have nothing to do in Georgia or Ukraine. It would be France’s role to say that Vladimir Putin’s claims are completely legitimate,” he said before accusing French and Western media of spending too much airtime demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia, like any other country, “pursues its policies and wants to defend and develop its interests,” Zemmour insisted.
Also during the interview, which at certain points looked more like an interrogation, Zemmour expressed his personal affection for the Russian civilization, saying: “I love the Russian people, I love Russian culture, I’m a fan of Russian literature, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Grossman.”
Having advocated for rapprochement between France and Russia before—and having previously defended Charles de Gaulle’s idea of “Europe from Brest to Vladivostok—Zemmour’s recent statements align with the pro-Russian opinions he’s expressed the past.
In September of 2020, while working as a political opinion host on the popular French television channel CNews, Zemmour suggested that Russia could be France’s “most reliable” ally—more so than the U.S., UK, or Germany. He also stressed that alienating Russian President Vladimir Putin from the West via economic sanctions was a “big mistake.”
