Will Les Bleus tackle France’s far right?

The latest outbreak of the 30-year war between the French football team and the far right was sparked by Marcus Thuram. The striker said “we were all shocked” when the players heard about the far-right Rassemblement National’s success in European elections on June 9. No wonder: most players in the squad are of immigrant descent, and the RN opposes immigration.

The conflict flared after President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections, with a run-off vote scheduled for July 7. The French far right’s best ever chance of entering a democratic government will coincide with the final week of the European football championship. France, who play the Netherlands this evening, are considered leading contenders for the trophy.

Thuram said: “We must fight so that the RN doesn’t pass.” He expressed “zero doubt” that “everyone in the team shares my vision”. His captain, Kylian Mbappé, was only slightly more cautious. Without naming the RN, he said he “shared the same values as Marcus”, was “against extremes”, and warned: “I hope I’ll still be proud to wear this shirt on July 7. I don’t want to represent a country that doesn’t correspond to our values.”

The national team and the RN stand for opposing visions of France: “Les Bleus” represent a country of united colours, whereas the RN thinks France’s big problem is immigration. But can the footballers help block the RN? Or could their activism give the party an unintended boost?

Les Bleus have been an instrument for debating race since at least Euro 1996, when the then far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, carped that it was “artificial to bring players from abroad and call them ‘the French team’.”

Almost every player was born in France, but according to the traditional far-right view, no one with immigrant origins could ever become truly French. Le Pen called the star player Zinedine Zidane “an Algerian born in France”. He was speaking to a long far-right lineage: the prewar far right, too, often dismissed ethnic minorities with French citizenship as mere “français de papier” (“paper French people”).

The national team at the time pushed back. Didier Deschamps, who today is France’s coach, said Le Pen had “talked nonsense”. 

But Le Pen knew that many voters agreed with him. A mixed French team won the World Cup in 1998, prompting then-president Jacques Chirac to laud “a tricoloured and multicoloured France”, yet two years later a survey by France’s human rights commission found that 36 per cent of respondents thought there were “too many players of foreign origin in the French football team”.

The conflict hotted up in 2002, when Le Pen reached the final round of the presidential election. His party “did not at all correspond to the values of France”, Zidane said. The French squad jointly condemned “resurgent notions of exclusion and racism”.

But the status of France’s footballers, perhaps especially those who are not white, is insecure. They are beloved when they win and behave well, and castigated when they do not. The team went through a long nadir from 2010, when it scandalised fans by going on strike during the World Cup, until 2015, when forward Karim Benzema was banned from Les Bleus after an affair known as “la sextape”. (He was found guilty of attempted blackmail in 2021.) Benzema, a pious Muslim, had long been a hate figure for the far right.

One veteran combatant in football’s struggle with the far right is Marcus Thuram’s father, Lilian. A right-back in the 1998 team, he is also an anti-racist activist who named his son after the Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Thuram père frequently tangled with the far right, once deadpanning: “Personally, I’m not Black. I’m French.” 

He told the Financial Times in 2016 that non-white players were expected to be “more than exemplary. Why? Because you are not entirely considered legitimate.” In short, he argued, non-white players were expected to earn their right to be considered French. 

Just as Marcus Thuram has succeeded his father in Les Bleus, Marine Le Pen replaced hers as far-right leader. She has said her preferred sport is rugby — a game associated with a whiter, rural France. When Zidane criticised her in 2017, she retorted: “Given what he earns, I understand that he votes for Macron.” 

She was deploying the standard far-right line of attack against footballers: that they are out-of-touch, overpaid expatriates, whose loyalties are divided between France and their parents’ countries of origin. Many French people voiced similar views on social media this week. Jordan Bardella, the RN’s candidate for prime minister, said he was “a little embarrassed” to see multimillionaires “give lessons to people who can no longer make ends meet, who no longer feel safe, who do not have the chance to live in neighbourhoods overprotected by security agents”.

The players hope to mobilise young and ethnic minority voters against the RN. In the run-off of the 2022 legislative elections, turnout was just 46 per cent. But the RN is making a different bet. It aims to lump together its immigrant-origin footballing critics with one of its favourite bogeymen, the French elite.

Much like Hollywood celebrities warning against Donald Trump, it is unclear whether the footballers’ attacks will harm the RN, or help it.