If it means that Le Pen gets in then the effect is the same and he must know that.
Everything is an academic exercise for Zizek. He enjoys the dialectics for their own sake. Nothing really matters. It couldn't do otherwise he would advise French voters to do the decent thing and vote against Le Pen. The giveaway in the quoted article is his failure to ask what might happen if the Le Pen wins the election in France. He's simply not bothered with that question which can only mean one of two things. Either (i) that secretly he hopes enough people WILL actually vote for Macron and stop fascism for him. Or (ii) politics are of no interest to him and he simply doesn't care about what happens to the poorest and most vulnerable.
There might be a third possibility, which is that Zizek is actually sympathetic to fascism. But there's no evidence of that so far as I can see. He doesn't see fascism as
particularly dangerous or
particularly objectionable. But he doesn't actually say anything positive in favour of the ideology.
In many ways he resembles the Far Left in many liberal democracies in as much as the Far Left tends to take a neutral ground when it comes to liberalism v fascism, NATO v Russia, and even ISIS v the USA (see Corbyn on this). There's always a bit of throat-clearing along the lines of "I don't like Putin" or "Obviously ISIS are brutal" or "I'm not keen on Le Pen" before the meat of the argument is presented...."But NATO is just as bad", "but American imperialism is even worse", "but Macron is the real cause of the sickness in France." All this is intellectually bankrupt of course and faced with the threat of extreme Right-Wing ideology represents the politics of appeasement and surrender. But it's surprisingly widespread.
