Far-right politician turns robots into an argument against immigration

🔍 WHY THIS STORY MATTERS
A French far-right politician is attaching automation to an explicitly anti-immigration programme, raising questions about what robotics can actually replace and how technology is being incorporated into Europe’s far-right politics.

KEY TAKEAWAYS...

● Éric Zemmour says AI and robotics could reduce France’s reliance on immigrant workers.

● His care home example also shows the difference between automating tasks and replacing whole jobs.

● “Remigration” links his robotics argument to a wider current within parts of Europe’s far-right.

T he leader of the French far-right party Reconquête, Éric Zemmour, is turning a debate about robots and artificial intelligence into an argument about immigration.

Zemmour says technological development could allow France to rely less on immigrant workers, explicitly presenting automation as an answer to claims that some industries cannot function without immigration.

At a political gathering on 13 September, the politician and polemist put the connection plainly.

“AI, my friends, coupled with robotics, will finally allow us to settle the issue of these so-called indispensable immigrants,” he told supporters.

He went on to invoke taxi drivers, delivery workers, builders, agricultural workers and employees in residential homes for elderly people, adding that Reconquête would “aimer les robots” (love robots).

Le Monde reported those remarks in the context of his promotion of “remigration” and characterised his broader programme as xenophobic. The underlying political positions are explicit: Zemmour wants substantially lower extra-European immigration and advocates removing categories of foreign residents from France.

The distinction matters because automation itself has no inherent immigration politics. A government can invest in robotics to increase productivity, respond to labour shortages, reduce dangerous work, help an ageing population or improve working conditions.

Zemmour gives that technology an additional purpose: reducing the economic demand for immigrants.

During his 17 September appearance on BFM-TV, he pointed to Asian economies as examples France should follow.

“It’s already happening in China, Japan, South Korea, there’s no reason we don’t do it,” he said. “We better invest quickly in this economic activity.”

The discussion became especially striking when it reached the Ehpads, France’s residential homes for dependent elderly people.

After the interview, Zemmour published a longer explanation in a social-media post of what he believed robots should actually do.

“Robots that help in Ehpads? Let’s be precise, because that’s where people talk rubbish,” he wrote. “What a machine can do is lift an 80-kg-elderly resident, take him to the end of a 200-metre long corridor, carry meals, fill out forms.”

Then he identified a boundary.

“What no machine will ever do is hold a hand, talk, reassure.”

But he continued:

“Today, a carer spends more time pushing beds and filling out forms than talking to those she looks after. This is the real scandal.”

And then:

“Every task we automate is human time given to the residents.”

His conclusion was:

“The more you automate routine tasks, the more we put people back at the heart of things.”

Taken by itself, that narrower argument is not especially ideological. Machines can perform repetitive and physically demanding work. Software can reduce paperwork. Automation can allow employees to spend more time on work requiring judgement, communication or human contact.

But Zemmour’s broader argument goes further.

He does not merely say that technology could make work easier. He says it could make immigrant workers less necessary. That difference is central to understanding what he is proposing.

A robot can replace a task without replacing a person

The Ehpads example demonstrates one of the weaknesses in treating automation as a straightforward substitute for migrant labour.

A task is not a job.

A machine that transports meals does not necessarily replace the worker who serves residents. Software that completes forms does not wash someone, monitor their condition or respond to an unexpected medical problem. Equipment that assists with lifting does not automatically remove the need for a trained member of staff.

Zemmour’s own language makes this distinction unusually clear.

In one part of his argument, robots reduce the need for workers. In another, robots free those same workers to spend more time with people. Both outcomes can result from automation. They are not the same thing.

It is entirely possible for technology to eliminate particular jobs. It can also change jobs without eliminating them, increase the productivity of existing workers or create demand for different skills.

The evidence that robots can perform more workplace functions therefore does not, by itself, demonstrate Zemmour’s broader proposition that France could substitute machines for immigrant labour across care, agriculture, construction, transport, and other sectors.

This is part of a wider immigration programme

Zemmour’s remarks cannot be separated from the political programme in which he places them. He confirmed during the TV interview that he intends to contest the 2027 presidential election. A Le Monde fact-check published days later examined another proposal from the same interview: his call to expel legally resident foreigners whom he said were living on social benefits. The newspaper concluded that the 1945 legal provision he invoked as precedent did not establish what he claimed.

“Remigration” is also part of Zemmour’s programme.

The term has been adopted in several European far-right circles, although its exact proposed implementation varies between movements and politicians. Zemmour has presented his own version as involving expulsions of foreign offenders and some unemployed foreigners. Le Monde places that definition against more radical uses of the concept elsewhere on the European far right.

That context makes his robotics argument politically different from a conventional call for technological investment. The worker whom his rhetoric seeks to make unnecessary is not an abstract employee. It is specifically the immigrant worker. That framing is why the proposal has to be examined as both an economic claim and an immigration policy argument.

Similar themes cross European borders

Zemmour is not operating in a political vacuum. Germany’s far-right AfD has also used “remigration” in its programme. At its January 2025 congress, the term was formally added to the party programme.

That does not mean Reconquête and the AfD are identical, nor does similar terminology prove that European far-right movements are controlled by a single organisation. What it does demonstrate is the circulation of related political themes: sharply reduced immigration, deportations, cultural nationalism and the argument that European societies should reduce reliance on migration.

The growing involvement of extremely wealthy individuals adds another dimension.

Elon Musk is an especially visible example.

Musk repeatedly promoted the AfD during Germany’s 2025 federal election campaign. He publicly said that only the AfD could “save Germany”, hosted its leader Alice Weidel for a lengthy conversation on X and appeared by video at an AfD campaign event. His support did not disappear after that election.

Following the AfD’s strong performance in a German state election in September 2026, Musk published numerous messages supporting the party and congratulated Weidel. Researchers said his earlier intervention had produced a measurable surge in attention for Weidel across both X and traditional German media.

That makes Musk a documented billionaire supporter and amplifier of the AfD. It does not make him a documented financial donor to the party.

Billionaire funding is documented elsewhere

There are, however, cases in which billionaire financing is explicit.

In Britain, cryptocurrency billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each gave £36 million to Reform UK in September, providing the party with £72 million in 24 hours.

The Guardian reported that they were jointly the largest individual donations made to a British political party under the modern disclosure system. Reform said the money would help it hire about 400 campaign managers in target constituencies.

The scale of those contributions triggered a wider debate over whether British political-donation rules give extremely wealthy individuals disproportionate influence. Questions have also arisen over whether the donations will remain permissible under legislation changing the rules governing donors with overseas connections. Reform has said the donations comply with the rules.

Some billionaires use media ownership, social platforms or personal visibility to amplify particular political movements. And anti-immigration parties in different countries increasingly use overlapping themes, including “remigration”.

Why Zemmour’s formulation matters

This wider political context leads back to the unusual feature of Zemmour’s proposal.

Robots are normally discussed in terms of what they might do to workers. Zemmour asks what they might do to the need for immigrant workers. That is a political choice of framing.

France could deploy exactly the same machine because it wanted to protect care workers from back injuries, increase productivity, cope with demographic ageing or improve services.

Zemmour explicitly connects it instead to his argument for reducing immigration. His proposal therefore contains two separate questions. The technological question is whether robots can increasingly perform work that human beings perform today.

The answer, for many individual tasks, is plainly yes. Recent demonstrations of AI-powered robots in Europe nevertheless show that many applications remain task-specific or experimental, as Euronews has reported.

The political and economic question is whether that development means France can dispense with substantial numbers of immigrant workers across the industries Zemmour invokes.

The evidence cited in his argument does not establish that conclusion. And his own care-home explanation illustrates why: He says the machine can lift. It can carry. It can transport meals. It can complete forms.

But then Zemmour himself describes the point at which the machine stops:

“What no machine will ever do is hold a hand, talk, reassure.”

A human being is still there.

The unresolved question in his political argument is why making that human being less likely to be an immigrant has become one of the purposes assigned to the technology.

🔮 WHAT MATTERS NEXT...

🎯 WHAT TO WATCH NEXT:

● Whether Zemmour turns the robotics argument into a detailed 2027 manifesto proposal identifying sectors, costs and expected labour effects.

● Whether his party specifies which forms of legal immigration it believes automation could reduce and over what timeframe.

● Whether evidence from care, logistics, agriculture and construction shows robots replacing whole jobs rather than automating individual tasks.

● Whether European parties using “remigration” continue to converge in language or policy while retaining distinct national programmes.

● Whether governments tighten political-funding rules as billionaire donations and platform-based political amplification attract greater scrutiny.

🎯 MOST LIKELY OUTCOME:

● In the near term, robotics is more likely to automate specific tasks and alter staffing needs than to provide a general substitute for immigrant labour across the sectors Zemmour cites.

🎯 WHAT COULD CHANGE THE PICTURE:

● A major fall in the cost of capable general-purpose robots, accompanied by evidence of safe, large-scale deployment in labour-intensive sectors, could materially change the economic case.

🎯 WHY THIS MATTERS:

● The argument shows how a genuine technological transition can be given a separate political purpose, in this case reducing immigration, that deserves scrutiny on its own terms.

GOING FURTHER

• Eric Zemmour veut expulser les étrangers en se basant sur une loi de 1945, une approximation historique et juridique | LE MONDE

• En Allemagne, l’AfD assume son programme d’extrême droite : « remigration », sortie de l’euro… | LE MONDE

• Elon Musk heaps praise on AfD’s Alice Weidel during live talk on X | THE GUARDIAN

• The AfD won a shock election in Germany. Elon Musk was thrilled | THE GUARDIAN

• Christopher Harborne matches £36m Reform donation of Ben Delo | THE GUARDIAN

• UK politics increasingly funded by billionaires as mega-donations surge | THE GUARDIAN

• AI-powered robots showcased at European Parliament in Brussels | EURONEWS

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Europeans TODAY on 10 October 2026.

▪ Cover: Dreamstime/KORWEN.