WASHINGTON — In recent months, leaders of Europe’s far-right nationalist parties have scrambled to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular policies of U.S. President Donald Trump. But this week in Washington, one aspiring European nationalist rushed headlong into MAGA’s warm embrace: Eric Zemmour, the leader of France’s far-right Reconquest party.
Zemmour, a writer and longtime anti-immigration activist who burst onto the French political scene with a long-shot bid for the presidency in 2022, was nominally in Washington to promote a new English-language translation of his 2014 book “The Suicide of France” — a jeremiad about the ills of mass migration and the decline of traditional French culture.
But Zemmour, who is reportedly laying the groundwork for another presidential bid in 2027, used his trip to visit some of the leading power centers of the Trumpist right. On Monday afternoon, he headlined an event at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that drew headlines during the 2024 U.S. presidential election for leading the controversial “Project 2025” initiative. Later that evening, Zemmour spoke at a private event hosted by American Moment, a conservative organization that places MAGA-aligned staffers in jobs in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill.
Speaking to POLITICO before his second event on Monday, Zemmour framed his trip to Washington as a kind of rallying cry for the transatlantic right. “Our principal message is that it is not only France that is committing suicide,” Zemmour, speaking through a translator, told POLITICO. “I’m calling upon all Western peoples to not follow the seductive path that the French followed and instead to wake up and see what’s happening.”
Zemmour, who arrived at both of his public appearances wearing a conspicuously bright red tie, also used his remarks in Washington to link himself to Trump’s recent accomplishments — in particular, the U.S. president’s sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. “When he talks about anti-migration politics, I see the same ideas that I talked about even before Trump entered onto the scene,” said Zemmour in his remarks at the American Moment event. “This isn’t something that is just the exclusive purview of MAGA and the Trump administration.”
Zemmour’s pilgrimage to Washington came at a particularly difficult moment for the global right. As recently as last year, MAGA-sympathetic conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic were speaking in grandiloquent terms about building a global alliance — a “nationalist international” dedicated to combating mass migration and the runaway forces of globalism.
In the past year, however, those international ambitions have run into the reality of nationalist politics, as MAGA-aligned politicians from Canada to Hungary have failed to turn the U.S. president’s support into electoral victories — and, in some cases, have been punished by voters for cozying up to him. In response, many of Europe’s most prominent nationalist figures — including Zemmour’s primary far-right rivals in France’s National Rally party — are now going out of their way to keep the U.S. president at arm’s length.
Zemmour, meanwhile, has taken the opposite tack, playing up his connections to Trump and the MAGA movement. Last year, he touted the fact that it was he — rather than his rivals in National Rally — who had scored an invite to Trump’s inauguration, which he attended alongside his romantic partner and primary political ally, Sarah Knafo, a member of the European Parliament. (The invite came from the conservative Claremont Institute, where Knafo had been a summer fellow.)
In Washington this week, Zemmour downplayed the potential political dangers of associating with Trump, casting National Rally as the party that had strayed from the right’s true mission by embracing statist economic policies. “National Rally is a party led by populists and socialists of the left, so it’s normal that they would feel out of tune with the American right,” he said. “Western peoples are engaged in a revolt of identity. Trump incarnates this in the United States, and I embody this in France.”
That message was well-received in Washington’s MAGA circles, where enthusiasm for Trump remains largely undimmed. At the event hosted by American Moment, which POLITICO was given exclusive access to attend, about 100 conservative operatives and young Republican staffers listened intently to Zemmour’s remarks while sipping on French-themed cocktails. Many in the crowd — which trended young and male — nodded along as Zemmour, flanked onstage by two American flags, invoked the memory of the Revolutionary War commander the Marquis de Lafayette as a model of Franco-American cooperation.
“Zemmour is somebody that a lot of young people in America have followed with particular interest for a number of years,” said Nick Solheim, CEO of American Moment and the event’s organizer. “He speaks in a way that a lot of American politicians — and in particular American conservatives — seem to be afraid of doing, so I thought it would be a good example to them.”
Zemmour’s no-holds-barred messaging has, of course, drawn criticism in France, where he was convicted under an anti-hate speech statute in 2022 for referring to unaccompanied migrant children as “thieves,” “murderers” and “rapists.” Zemmour, who is Jewish, has also drawn criticism in the past for his attempts to rehabilitate the memory of the Vichy regime, which he has argued deserves more credit than it receives for protecting French Jews from the Nazis during the World War II.
That appetite for historical revisionism — along with his acerbic criticism of France’s leading nationalist party — has invited comparisons between Zemmour and American political commentator Tucker Carlson, another conservative media figure-turned-populist gadfly who recently broke with many of his would-be allies on the nationalist right. As with Zemmour, Carlson has been the subject of intensifying presidential speculation in recent months, fueled by his increasingly strident criticism of the Trump administration’s war with Iran and the Republican Party’s ongoing support for Israel.
Zemmour, for his part, said he does not know Carlson personally and “has only followed him from afar.” He said he had taken note of Carlson’s criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy decisions in Iran, but he rejected the idea that there is a significant audience on the French right for a Carlson-style critique of Israel. “I think Israel is part of the West, and once they’re inside our civilization, they’re part of us,” he said. “That’s the way we need to see this issue.”
Unlike Carlson, who has denied rumors that he is considering a U.S. presidential run in 2028, Zemmour has not moved to tamp down speculation about another bid in 2027. “Not yet,” he told POLITICO when asked if he had made a decision about running.
His chances, should he choose to run, would be slim. Despite extensive media coverage, Zemmour managed to eke out only 7 percent of the vote in the first round of France’s 2022 presidential elections, and his primary rivals — National Rally’s Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella — have since consolidated much of the nationalist vote. Meanwhile, Zemmour’s Reconquest party has seen its power diminish in recent years, winning no seats in France’s National Assembly elections and only five seats in the European Parliament in 2024. (Four of the party’s members were subsequently expelled for supporting a strategic alliance with National Rally, leaving Reconquest with Knafo as its only representative in Brussels.)
Nevertheless, Zemmour said he’s confident that a presidential bid would serve a serious political purpose. “Back in 2022, what I was trying to do was tell them about the great replacement that was going on,” he said. “Now it would be thinking more about the practical solutions” to facilitate what he has called “the politics of remigration.”
“If we enter the race, it’s only to win,” said Zemmour. “Otherwise, we don’t do it.”
