When a far-right candidate has ‘le buzz’, France shouldn’t take young people for granted | Oliver Haynes

The youth movement around Eric Zemmour, though small, is an indication that this deeply political generation can also be nihilistic

• This article was highly commended in the Guardian Foundation's 2021 Hugo Young award, which champions political opinion writing among 18- to 25-year-olds

In early 2019 I was teaching French sixth formers on an Erasmus placement when we got into a discussion about immigration. Some girls spoke admiringly of women on the centre-right, some boys were liberal left, though suspicious of the excesses of internet social justice politics, while others might be dismissed as woke".

They all rolled their eyes when I asked them what they thought of Eric Zemmour, the smirking far-right polemicist running for president. My students thought he was racist and wrote him off as a crank. They hated Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) but took her seriously. You had to accept that she was part of the political furniture, but this guy was beyond the pale. He had, after all, been convicted of hate speech.

Oliver Haynes, a student from City of London University, was highly commended in the Guardian Foundation's Hugo Young award for political opinion writing 2021, for this piece