The prodigious French striker is the political football of far-right fans

When France met with West Germany in Seville in the semifinals of the World Cup in 1982, many French fans considered the Germans more than mere adversaries: they were the descendants of enemies of war. The kick of German goalkeeper Toni Schumacher who entered the Frenchman Patrick Battiston and the agonizing French defeat with sanctions provoked traumatic memories.

But when France meet Germany in Munich on Tuesday for their first Euro 2020 match, some French fans have chosen a different enemy: their own central striker, Karim Benzema.

The French far right has considered him the personification of the outskirts, the immigrant periphery, mostly poor, where France stores its lower castes. He outskirts they have replaced Germany as the main site of French fears of violent attack. Once again, French world champions have become the subject of a Trump-style cultural war centered on race.

In 2015, Benzema was kicked out of the team after allegations that he helped a friend blackmail a French international colleague into what became known as “the sextape”; the case goes to trial in October. Then the far-right leader Marine Le Pen He led the post: “Karim Benzema should never have joined the French team. I think he is someone who has repeatedly expressed his contempt for France.” Now, after nearly six years in the doghouse, he has been remembered Blue.

Benzema is a tailor-made target for the far right. Originally from Algeria, he grew up in a suburb outside Lyon and became a billionaire expatriate in Real Madrid. Once he called Algeria “my country.”

Just after the story of the “sextape” erupted, the terrorist attacks of November 2015 when jihadist terrorists killed 130 people in the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France stadium and Parisian cafes and restaurants, they provoked French concerns about young men of immigrant origin. Eight days after the attacks, Benzema was filmed spitting – unintentionally, he insists – after a play on Marseille.

In many countries, the national football team is considered the nation made flesh. Some French have never accepted that this national symbol is not mostly white.

In 1999, the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights of France added a new question to its annual survey of racist attitudes: there were “too many foreign players on the French football team?” The previous year, the “players of foreign origin” had won world champions in France. However, 31% of respondents totally or mostly agreed with the statement. Jean-Marie, Marine Le Pen’s father, knew exactly what he was doing when he complained “that they let players come from abroad and baptize them with the French team.”

Disaffection with the Blue would reach its peak during the 2010 World Cup, when the players, who were fighting with their coach, began to strike in the middle of the tournament. Months later, officials from the French football federation, including then-coach Laurent Blanc, argued reduce the number of black players in national youth training centers. In 2013, a survey of BVA consultants found that 82% of French people had a “bad opinion” Blue.

In 2018, a clean, almost non-white team, playing without Benzema, restored the Bluepopularity by winning the World Cup. Today, France’s favorite footballer, according to an Odoxa poll, is Kylian Mbappé, a Parisian of Suburbs of Cameroonian and Algerian origin. He told me: “I have always felt French. I don’t give up my origins, because they are part of who I am, but they never made me feel like I wasn’t at home here. ”

These feelings of belonging are regularly expressed by 2018 players, who opposed the U.S.-based South African comic book joke. Trevor Noah that “Africa won the World Cup”. Sure, players are sincere, but they also know they can’t risk taking positions for blackness or against French racism.

The attacks on Benzema have reminded them of this. Stéphane Ravier, senator of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party, called the striker “a paper Frenchman”. Most far-right supporters oppose Benzema’s withdrawal, for example Ifop surveyors. And the RN has opened another front in the culture war, with party vice-president Jordan Bardella complaining that a rapper was chosen to compose the team’s official song for Euro 2020. Bardella he called it surrender to the “slag“(” Slag “): a long-established key word for non-white youth travelers.

France is the favorite of bookmakers to raise the euro. However, even if they win, it will not cure national divisions. This is exactly what many had expected after the victory in 1998. The Demographer Said Michèle Tribalat then the multicultural team had done “more for integration than years of political will.” Events already suggest otherwise. The French team is not a hammer, an instrument that can rebuild France. Rather, it is a mirror in which the country sees itself.