Why has Trump invited Zemmour – and not Le Pen – to his inauguration?

 

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why has Trump invited Zemmour – and not Le Pen – to his inauguration?

16 January 2025, 6:00am

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-has-trump-invited-zemmour-and-not-le-pen-to-his-inauguration/

 

There will be two politicians from France in Washington next week to see Donald Trump sworn in as president – and Emmanuel Macron isn’t one of them. The president didn’t get an invite (unlike his European rival, Giorgia Meloni) and nor for that matter did Marine Le Pen.

 

It says much about how Reconquest is viewed by Team Trump that a party with no seats in the National Assembly is invited to his inauguration

 

The two French politicians invited to witness arguably the greatest political resurrection in American political history are Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo. The latter was until a few months ago best known as Zemmour’s partner – professionally and privately. The 31-year-old Knafo was an adviser to Zemmour when he launched his ‘Reconquest’ party in 2021, a telegenic woman described as his ‘éminence grise’.

 

Her backstory is unusual; her parents are Moroccan Jews who emigrated to France after the Six Day War in 1967. She went through ENA, France’s technocratic finishing school – alma mater of Emmanuel Macron and many of his ministers – and rose quickly through the civil service ranks. She is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think-tank in California close to Trump

 

Last year she stood in the European elections and became one of Reconquest’s five MEPs. And then the party disintegrated as Zemmour and his vice-president, Marion Marechal (the niece of Marine Le Pen) had a very public disagreement about the best strategy to adopt in the legislative elections. Marechal advocated allying with Le Pen’s National Rally, and Zemmour did not. Consequently Marechal left the party, along with three other MEPs.

 

That left Knafo as Reconquest’s sole representative in the European parliament. But it says much about how Reconquest is viewed by Team Trump that a party with no seats in the National Assembly and just one in Strasbourg, is invited to his inauguration.

 

It also speaks volumes about Le Pen’s status with the president elect. In January 2017 – three months before the French presidential election – she was seen visiting Trump Tower in the hope of an audience. No luck. It was a rather humiliating experience for Le Pen, who was filmed in the building waiting like a starstruck fan for a rock star. A few weeks earlier she had described his victory over Hillary Clinton ‘an additional stone in the building of a new world’.

 

In the years since, she has done nothing to cultivate a relationship with Team Trump, and in contrast to how Le Pen responded to his 2016 victory she offered only cursory congratulations the second time around. According to a report in Charlie Hebdo, Le Pen even banned her MPs from celebrating Trump’s win because his style is now ‘incompatible’ with her party.

 

Zemmour, on the other hand, has been buttering up Trump from practically the moment he quit journalism for politics in 2021. In February 2022 he boasted of his 40-minute phone call with Trump, a ‘warm’ exchange in which Zemmour was advised: ‘Don’t give in to anything, stand your ground, remain courageous, it’s tenacity and endurance that pay off.’

 

They haven’t paid off yet for Zemmour, whose party failed to win a seat in the National Assembly in 2022 and 2024. He has the intellect, all right, but not the charisma or the warmth that wows voters in this age where image is everything. That’s where Knafo comes in. The camera likes her and in recent months she has been a regular on television, singing the praises of – among others – Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson.

 

She describes herself as representing the ‘modern right’ – she is a passionate advocate of bitcoin – and contrasts her liberal economics with what she calls the left-wing economics of Le Pen. In Strasbourg, she frequently rails against the EU, creating what Le Figaro described in a recent profile as a ‘small earthquake’. Ursula von der Leyen is a favourite target.

 

In a speech last September (which was translated into English and went viral), Knafo accused the EU of restricting people’s freedom of expression and said they had been ‘muzzled, intimidated and punished’. But she vowed that Brussels would not win. ‘We will always prefer Tocqueville to Thierry Breton, Elon Musk to Ursula von der Leyen, and freedom to censorship.’

 

In an interview last week Knafo again defended Musk, rubbishing the idea that he was interfering in European politics. When the presenter remarked that she and Zemmour were the only politicians invited to Trump’s inauguration her grin was as wide as the Seine.

 

Only one seat in the European parliament but two invitations to the biggest political event of the year. It’s some turnaround in the fortunes of Knafo and her party as they seek to grow their influence within the French right.

 

As Charle Hebdo remarked in a recent interview, Reconquest was on life support after its summer implosion but Trump has provided the ‘electroshock’ to revive it. Knafo sees Trump as an inspiration for her party. ‘Donald Trump has risen again when everyone wrote him off in 2020,’ she told Charlie. ‘It shows that in politics you’re never really finished.’

 

Gavin Mortimer

Written by

Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.