PARIS — French far-right provocateur éric Zemmour on Tuesday announced his candidacy for next April’s presidential election, officially joining a tense race he had already upended in recent weeks even before his announcement.

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       In a 10-minute video, Zemmour echoed some of the divisive themes that he has frequently relied on to draw supporters to crowded venues in recent weeks, and which have largely revolved around the decline of France.

       “It is no longer time to reform France, but to save it. That’s why I decided to run for president,” he said in the video.

       In recent polls of voting, President Emmanuel Macron leads the race, but with only about a quarter of the vote. Zemmour, meanwhile, has in recent weeks come at times close to matching the support for more established far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, with numbers in the midteens. If Zemmour builds on his position, that could give him a shot at reaching the second round of the elections, facing off against Macron.

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       Over the last few days, however, Le Pen has once again widened her lead over Zemmour, proving how volatile early polls can be. Zemmour could still turn out to have been a short-lived far-right sensation, and he recently showed rare regret after he gave an opponent the middle finger.

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       But some already see Zemmour as Macron’s most serious — and as his most divisive — contender.

       Zemmour’s opponents fear he is using similar strategies — and tapping into the same sentiments — that helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency. He feeds the 24/7 news cycle with a constant stream of provocations: demanding a ban on foreign-sounding first names, complaining of an “invasion” by migrants, blaming “Islamic colonization” for crime that makes life in some parts of France “unlivable,” and demanding that the country be returned to past glory.

       Until recently, Le Pen and her National Rally party had been considered to be the only significant far-right movement in France that may have a shot at reaching the second round of a presidential election. Le Pen made it there in 2017, but lost to Macron by a wide margin of over 30 percent.

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       The Le Pen party’s history of Holocaust revisionism has made it unsupportable for a segment of French voters.

       But in part because Zemmour is himself Jewish — his parents moved from Algeria to the Parisian suburbs before the colony’s war of independence — he has succeeded in making once-fringe opinions more acceptable.

       Zemmour is also a known face among many French television viewers and newspaper readers. He had his own column in the right-leaning Le Figaro newspaper and was the public face of a show on CNews, described by some as France’s Fox News.

       For now, Zemmour’s most significant impact has been the gradual normalization of views that used to be seen as beyond the realm of decency. He has been convicted of provoking racial hatred against Muslims — and once again went on trial two weeks ago for describing unaccompanied child migrants as “thieves,” “killers” and “rapists.”

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