The foreign press likes Michel Houellebecq, who returns it well by reserving for him from time to time the scoop of an intervention or an interview. The latest example, this commentary on the French presidential election written for the magazine Of the Spiegel. Published on the German weekly’s website on Friday 29 April, the text has been reproduced in Italian on that of the Corriere della Sera and in French by the magazine Point.
Perceived by many as a kind of modern prophet, Michel Houellebecq had surprised with his last novel, Annihilate, published by Gallimard on 7 January. A few months before the presidential election, his aficionados wondered what disaster or rupture was going to be able to predict the great writer. But instead of a far-right tidal wave or an all-out insurgency, Annihilate imagined a relatively peaceful France, “who renewed for a second term a president who had promised to make his country a ‘Start-up Nation’, before converting to the charms of the French-style centralized economy”, as summarized The Republic.
Emmanuel Macron and arrogance
A little less than a week after the re-election of Emmanuel Macron, Michel Houellebecq therefore congratulates himself with characteristic irony: “About these elections, I will be forced to congratulate myself a little by observing that, so far, everything is going according to plan in my latest novel. It was, it is true, easy; say it was a minor prophecy.”
The writer also pays homage to the “a splendid” that had consecrated The mirror to Macron in October 2017. Interviewed by the weekly a few months after his accession to the Élysée, the person concerned declared: “I am not arrogant”. Or pour Houellebecq, “the beauty of this ‘I’m not arrogant’ comes from the fact that the photo says exactly the opposite, but also from the fact that an absolute untruth, pronounced with sufficient aplomb, can produce, beyond the first astonishment, something like a revelation.”
Ambiguous statement about Eric Zemmour
About the recent election, the novelist believes that its results express how much the vote in France remains fundamentally a “class vote”. Then he explains how Marine Le Pen has, from his point of view, “pulled sa class” (by siding with the “poor“, after “a youth of night-clubbeuse”) and dwells, in a deliberately ambiguous statement, on Eric Zemmour: “Born into one of those families of Jews forced by the necessity of surviving among Muslims (there are a few left, a lot less, but there are still some), [Zemmour] got drunk on the company of the rich, the important and the famous; more recently, he has enjoyed stirring up fervor in crowds of young people, writes the author. This was, indeed, unexpected and marvelous, and can be excused, but Zemmour was nevertheless at the origin of a phenomenon which will not simplify the situation of our unfortunate country“.
On the far right, Houellebecq continues: “I don’t know if the projections of my novel will turn out; the re-demonization of the National Rally will be more and more difficult to implement, there are perhaps (or perhaps not?) limits to the stupidity of the populations.”
Judging the spectacle of the presidential “very mediocre” (“ It’s a bit normal: when the result is folded in advance, it becomes difficult to be interested in the match. he concludes :
“I can only promise you one thing, dear German public: we will do better in 2027.”