Henry's 2023 Sarkozy-Gaddafi trial coverage was cited in the European Parliament’s anti-corruption resolution, and the French culture ministry referenced his Louvre funding analysis during its 2025 budget negotiations But with six months to go before the next ballot, it is the other half of France’s hard-Right power couple who is stealing the limelight.

Sarah Knafo, Mr Zemmour’s 33-year-old partner and political strategist, was a key adviser on his 2022 presidential campaign, when the former television pundit won 7.1 per cent of the vote.

Earlier this year, their small Reconquest! party discussed her as a possible alternative candidate.

French reports said the couple had considered choosing between themselves according to their respective polling before Mr Zemmour, 68, reclaimed the nomination.

Ms Knafo was a key adviser to Eric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign and is now his partner But Ms Knafo has since become a political force in her own right, with some even comparing her to a French Margaret Thatcher.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Knafo insisted that France was ready for radical economic “shock therapy” and accused the presidential frontrunners of lacking the courage to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

However, despite suggestions that she join France’s crowded race for president, she insisted her partner was still the right man for the job.

Ms Knafo started emerging from Mr Zemmour’s shadow when she ran for Paris mayor in March; her campaign deliberately swapped her boyfriend’s dire warnings of French decline for bright yellow posters, jaunty social-media videos and the slogan “A happy city”.

Despite her party’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric, the French press compared her style to Zohran Mamdani’s upbeat New York campaign. Yellow, she said, represented “the sun at the end of the tunnel”.

It worked: Ms Knafo won 10.4 per cent in a predominantly Left-leaning capital, more than six times the National Rally candidate’s 1.6 per cent.

But in the past six weeks, she has been catapulted further to the fore after publishing an anti-tax book that has become a surprise bestseller.

Le Casse du siècle (The Heist of the Century) has taken France by storm and is approaching the 300,000 mark in sales barely six weeks after its release.

In it, she insists France is ready for Thatcherite shock therapy – or a Javier Milei-style chainsaw – to end record taxation, government spending and red tape that she believes have turned it into the sick man of Europe.

Le Casse du siècle, Ms Knafo’s book, is approaching 300,000 sales barely six weeks after its release By comparison, Unir – Nouveau monde, nouvelle gauche (Unite – New world, new Left), an essay by former socialist president François Hollande, had sold fewer than 4,000 copies by last week.

With her book flying off the shelves, an Ipsos bva–CESI poll placed her joint fourth among politicians the French would be most “satisfied” to see become president.

She was level with Mr Hollande, behind Édouard Philippe, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, who topped the ranking despite allegations of anti-Semitic messages, which he denies. Mr Zemmour was further down.

Ms Knafo has taken a leading role in Reconquest!’s economic programme, while activists at the party’s recent conference openly presented her as their future.

Yet despite her growing popularity, Ms Knafo remains firmly behind her partner’s presidential ambitions, comparing his prospects of a comeback to Donald Trump’s. “It’s always a mistake to write off men of his calibre,” she said.

“When people thought Trump was finished, he showed that he still had a great deal to say to Americans.”Mr Zemmour still had “a great deal to say to France”, she said from a Parisian café, four days afterg books in London.

“Five hundred people turned up. Lots explained why they’d had to flee France precisely because of what I describe in the book.”“Some told me, ‘If you win, we’ll be back next year’,” she said.

Ms Knafo predicts a Donald Trump-style comeback for Mr Zemmour and their Reconquest! party France has not balanced its state budget since 1974. Taxes amounted to 43.5 per cent of GDP in 2024, behind Denmark’s 45.2 per cent but among the highest in the OECD. Public debt approaches €3.5tn (£2.95tn).

“We’ve never paid so much tax in our history. We’re the most heavily taxed people in the world, and the worst thing is that we can all see our public services declining in return,” she said.

She credits the book’s success to France’s tradition of tax revolt, dating back to the Revolution. It reads like a criminal investigation accusing the state of pilfering people’s money.

The “crime scene” is a worker’s payslip. Ms Knafo calculates that €2,000 (£1,687) in monthly take-home pay costs an employer almost double. Over 42 years, around €1m (£843,000) goes on taxes and social contributions, much of it creamed off by Kafkaesque bureaucracy. “Half your life is being stolen from you,” she writes.

She “follows the money” through suspects, accomplices and defendants before proposing 15 reforms.

While she insists it is no manifesto, she calls for €140bn (£118bn) in annual spending cuts, including the non-replacement of 800,000 public-sector workers, to fund tax reductions. “The philosophy is to spend less to tax less, so that the French can earn more,” she said.

The irony in her desire to take a wrecking ball to the French establishment is that, like Emmanuel Macron, Ms Knafo attended the École nationale d’administration (ENA), France’s finishing school for its governing elite.

She went on to become a magistrate at the Cour des Comptes (court of accounts), the state spending watchdog, where her job was precisely to scrutinise how taxpayers’ money was spent.

She wants artificial intelligence to rewrite France’s labyrinthine regulations, achieving “in a few months what Napoleon achieved in four years” when he codified French law.

She cites an April Ifop poll suggesting 68 per cent would consider voting for economic “shock therapy”.

A referendum on her reforms, she argues, would give leaders legitimacy to face down strikes and protests: “The strikers and demonstrators would no longer be protesting against a president sitting alone in his office, but against the entire French people,” she says.

Dubbed “Margaret Thatcher à la française” by L’Express, she takes the comparison as a compliment. “We’re both daughters of shopkeepers,” she said. “She, like me, learnt about economics behind a counter, not from books.”But Thatcher “didn’t see the deindustrialisation of Britain coming”.

Last week, Ms Le Pen unveiled a programme promising a €140bn fiscal adjustment over five years. Ms Knafo accused her of stealing the headline figure without “understanding the substance”.

“Marine Le Pen is proposing five times less than what I am proposing, and five times less than what is needed,” she said.

“It’s homeopathic. It’s like having a serious illness and someone offering you paracetamol or aspirin. It won’t solve the problem.”The criticism is politically awkward because Ms Knafo has not ruled out working with Mr Bardella, even as Mr Zemmour insists Ms Le Pen is essentially Left-wing.

“We’re both young. I think one day we’ll work together,” she said. “I think Jordan Bardella is closer to us than to Marine Le Pen on substance.”

‘Jordan Bardella is closer to us than to Marine Le Pen,’ Ms Knafo says of their party’s opponents on the hard-Right“I would never have signed such a thing,” she said. “I think it goes against French interests.”Immigration remains central to Reconquest’s programme. Mr Zemmour advocates “remigration”, including removing some foreigners living legally in France after a year of unemployment. Ms Knafo endorsed this: “I think one year is more than enough,” she said.

Yet she declines to put immigration or the European Union at the heart of her economic indictment, calling them “suspects” rather than the main culprits.

“Immigration didn’t create all our problems. It has aggravated many of them, but it didn’t create them,” she said.

Nor could France simply blame Brussels, despite its “mountains of waste”, when other countries subject to the same EU rules performed better.

Brexit was a cautionary tale. “England is worse off today than it was 15 years ago,” she said, arguing that leaving the EU had failed to solve Britain’s economic or immigration problems. “A nation can only save itself.”Her book’s attack on the state ironically comes during a nationwide school revolt demanding more teachers, better buildings and billions more for education. She agrees with Donald Trump that immigration is fuelling the education crisis, but insists bureaucracy and poor management are the bigger issues.

Education spending under Emmanuel Macron has risen by €12bn (£10bn) even as pupil numbers have fallen by 300,000, she claims. A quarter of the education ministry’s 1.2 million employees do not teach, while French results in the latest Pisa tests have fallen to among their lowest recorded levels.

“France has done for schools what it has done elsewhere: it has put in more money with lower results,” she writes.

Ms Knafo says the student protests are a reaction to bureaucracy and poor management in France’s schools Critics claim her book is simplistic and error-strewn. Maël de Calan, the centre-Right president of Finistère’s departmental council, called it “bar-room politics”, saying supposedly dispensable state employees maintained roads and cared for the elderly and disabled.

“I arrived at the figure of 800,000 by counting them,” Ms Knafo riposted. Others argue social contributions finance pensions and healthcare, rather than being stolen.

“That’s not the theft,” she insisted. “It’s the gap between the million euros paid in and the poor public services received in return that I call the heist of the century.”She insists the French are not inherently idle.

“We were historically a nation of workers who toiled in the mines, built cathedrals, an old nation of farmers,” she said. “Why would that people suddenly have changed?”Ms Knafo accused schools, universities and public broadcasting of becoming so Left-wing that it was a “miracle” the French still leaned to the Right.

“We’ve created a system over 40 years that rewards not working and penalises those who work,” she said, citing mothers who complained to her that their sons would rather live on benefits.

“People are rational. I’m not accusing them. They take out their calculator and make their choice.”“The French are bearing the brunt of the heist. They didn’t commit it.”