At the time these lines were written, the remains of Bernard Tapie were exposed on the lawn of the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille, where thousands of people came to pay him a last tribute. In Marseille, time has stood still. The funeral of the former president of Olympique de Marseille (OM), the city’s great soccer team, will take on the appearance of a state funeral this Friday.
However, Bernard Tapie, who died last Sunday, was not President of the Republic. He leaves behind no great enterprise, no political reform and no major work. Some might even qualify him as a bling-bling businessman with a rather slim political career and whose financial troubles still hide gray areas.
But to understand the overwhelming affection that this character with his communicative frankness has always raised, it is necessary to know that Tapie was above all the symbol of an era. For better or for worse.
Among business and showbiz, this handsome kid born in the 20e arrondissement of Paris will make a career out of buying bankrupt companies. As globalization is in full swing, Tapie is becoming the symbol of easy money. He was notably the boss of Adidas and OM (bought for a symbolic franc). Tapie will lead the team to victory against AC Milan in the Champions League final. The only cup ever won by a French club.
Before Trump and Berlusconi, he became a television star. His banter and his uninhibited verb work wonders on the sets. This is what François Mitterrand understood when he sought to be re-elected in 1988.
The Socialist Party was then at a turning point. Elected by popular circles, he had taken the turn of austerity and privatizations. The pill was bitter. All of Mitterrand’s Machiavellianism will consist in getting re-elected by setting up a small group then named SOS Racisme and taking as a scapegoat the National Front, a party which had obtained less than 1% of the votes in the previous presidential election.
Tapie will become the toy of this strategy. It is he that will be launched against Jean-Marie Le Pen and his inflammatory statements. It was not until 2007 that Lionel Jospin finally admitted that this anti-fascism “was only theater”. With the result that the question of immigration will be taboo in France for at least 30 years and that the popular classes will desert the left for the National Front.
A few decades later, Bernard Tapie’s career partly explains what has been called the “Zemmour phenomenon” for several weeks. With 17% of voting intentions according to the most recent poll, the essayist and journalist who is still not officially a candidate is reshuffling all the political cards. At this level, he would pass the helm of the second round of the presidential election.
Yet it was predictable. If all the polls had predicted a Macron-Le Pen final for a year, the same surveys confirmed that a majority of French people did not want to replay the 2017 match. Éric Zemmour was the perfect opportunity. Its meteoric progression sends back into the cables not only the RN (15%), but also the candidates of the traditional right like Xavier Bertrand (13%).
All are pale next to this born debater, whose enormous advantage is to ask openly and bluntly the question of immigration and the predominantly Muslim ghettos which are multiplying in the large cities of France. A finding shared for years by a majority of French people and even by the president, if we are to believe his most recent statements.
After years of denial, many French people are happy to see Zemmour finally impose this question at the heart of the presidential election, even if they do not espouse all his ideas. Unlike his competitors, he does so without dragging behind him the series of electoral failures that handicaps Marine Le Pen, or the historic double speech of the candidates of the Republicans (LR). He also proposes to settle this heartbreaking question in the clearest and most Gaullian way possible: by referendum. A proposal which is not far from convincing a majority of French people.
For now, the more arrows his opponents have, the more they seem to have the effect of pushing him up in the polls. Rarely has a presidential candidate participated in so many substantive debates in such a short time. Debates at a level that is difficult to imagine elsewhere than in France. That of two hours on BFMTV with the leader of rebellious France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was followed by nearly four million viewers. The last one, with the philosopher Michel Onfray, was sold out. It was the first time that the 3,700 seats of the Palais des congrès had been filled since Charles Aznavour’s farewell tour in 2018. In two weeks, Zemmour had to participate in more than ten exchanges of this type on sets of all the major political shows.
And the French are asking for more! As if this way of debating openly and without taboos had given back its letters of nobility to politics. His opponents had better hurry to do the same.