In World Cup year, France team has something to celebrate with Le Pen’s defeat

Days before the defeat of Marine Le Pen to Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the French presidential elections, sportsmen in the country had signed an open letter, published in the newspaper Le Parisien, in which they asked citizens to vote for the re-election of the current president.

World champion in 2018 with France, midfielder Blaise Matuidi was one of the signatories, accompanied by former team-mate Dimitri Payet and women’s national team players Amandine Henry and Eugénie Le Sommer.

Notable athletes from other sports also signed the letter, but it is in football that the anti-immigration policy defended by the far-right leader finds greater confrontation and repercussion.

Matuidi is the son of an Angolan mother and a Congolese father. Payet was born on the island of La Reunión, a French overseas department located in the Indian Ocean. They are both black, have origins outside of France’s European borders, so they grew up hearing from politicians like Marine Le Pen that they are not legitimate French. It is not surprising that they publicly take a stand against her and what her policy stands for.

“We feel that France doesn’t fully recognize itself in this team,” said Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and also a presidential candidate in the 1990s and 2000s, during the 2006 World Cup. [Raymond Domenech] exaggerated the proportion of colored players.”

In 1998, Jean-Marie Le Pen had already said that the team that would represent France in the World Cup that year, based in the country, was too black.

The title won over Brazil, in Paris, with two goals by Zinedine Zidane, son of Algerians, represented a blow to the popularity of the far-right, who saw the face of the newest French idol reproduced on the Arc de Triomphe with the phrase “Zidane president! “.

It was the victory of the “black-blanc-beur” (black, white and Arab) generation, which in addition to Zidane had, for example, Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, Thierry Henry, with parents from Guadalupe and Martinique, Robert Pires, son of a Portuguese and a Spaniard, and Youri Djorkaeff, with Armenian roots.

The weekly magazine L’Express published, under the title “The World Cup that changed France”, a text in which it said: “The French people, all the French people, were able to identify with this team in France because it was a multicultural team, made up of great players and, above all, great people. With idols like these, our children can dream of a bright future.”

The general feeling of pride in an integrated France, however, did not last long. Not even with the Euro 2000 title.

In October 2001, less than a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the French and Algerians faced each other in a football match for the first time since Algeria’s independence in 1962. The friendly was seen as an opportunity for reconciliation. .

On the lawn of the Stade de France, what was seen was a game that did not end due to the invasion of fans onto the pitch. The episode had serious implications for immigrants in the country and served as fuel for the already inflamed Le Pen, who months later reached the second round of the presidential elections, losing to Jaques Chirac.

“I knew that the young Frenchmen who invaded the countryside would soon be described as young Algerians. People would quickly forget that they were actually French. And then, Algerians would be Muslims. That’s how our society works,” said the former. defender Lilian Thuram, now an activist against racism, about what happened.

In the same year, 2005, the death of two black teenagers in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis led to a series of demonstrations across the country, which included thousands of burning cars and clashes between the population and police forces.

Then-Interior Minister Nikolas Sarkozy spoke of his desire to “throw out the scum,” in a nod to the electorate of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party.

More recently, in 2010, France reached what is considered to be the lowest point in their football history.

At the World Cup in South Africa, a team at odds with the coach, Raymond Domenech, failed to get past the group stage. Forward Nicolas Anelka, a Muslim, had a falling out with the coach after the loss to Mexico in the second round and was expelled from the delegation. The group even added to the embarrassment the chapter of the strike on the bus. Before training before the last match, against the South Africans, the athletes refused to get out of the vehicle.

Minister of Health and Sports in the government chaired at the time by Sarkozy, Roselyne Bachelot delivered to the president himself a report on the crisis installed in the French national team. In the document, she referred to the players as “caïds”, which translates to gangsters.

With its image scratched after repeated sporting failures, exacerbated by off-field events, the French federation resorted in 2012 to the image of Didier Deschamps, world champion in 1998, to command a renewal of names and profile in the national team. The rebels left, the behaved ones entered.

N’Golo Kanté, Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappé, dedicated athletes with an almost impeccable posture, became the symbols of the 2018 world championship in Russia.

To Marine Le Pen’s dismay, as to her father’s two decades earlier, the face of the title won in Moscow bore traces of immigration. Mbappé, born to an Algerian and Cameroonian mother, was born in Bondy, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, and has become the country’s biggest football sensation since Zidane.

Led by the boy from the periphery, the French will arrive in Qatar as favorites. And reinforced by the incorporation of Karim Benzema, who was out of the squad for years due to his involvement, in 2015, in an attempt to extort his teammate Mathieu Valbuena, so that a video with sexual content involving the media was not shared. -camper.

In other times, the scandal with the Real Madrid striker would have dropped like a bomb on the French national team and federation. Unlike his predecessors, however, Didier Deschamps managed to manage the crisis and build a group that maintained order off the field and showed results inside it (even without Benzema and with the criticized Olivier Giroud in his place), reaching the runner-up at Euro 2016 and the world title in 2018.

That’s why the attacker’s return to the national team, last year, on the eve of the Euro Cup, aroused few manifestations against it. “It was a deep conviction that led me to call him up,” said the coach, who saw in the process of qualifying for Qatar an even better understanding of the Real Madrid athlete with his strike partners Mbappé and Griezmann.

Now, without Marine Le Pen in the highest position in the nation, Deschamps’ men will be able to have a little more peace on the way to the third championship, even if the ultra-rightist and her supporters do not refrain from showing again their displeasure with the colors and origins of those who made and can make France champion again.