HAMBURG — “I am on your left, the extreme left,” a journalist said, as Kylian Mbappe looked for his questioner. “Luckily you weren’t on the other side.”
A seismic moment is upon Mbappe and his French team, dwarfing anything the nation’s captain can conjure on the pitch.
And it could not be any more at the forefront of the players’ minds.
Politics is a subject footballers rarely venture into. John Stones refused to divulge his views on the UK general election, insisting his team-mates are similarly non-plussed.
Gareth Southgate and Harry Kane will talk on certain societal issues but avoid partisan politics. That reluctance has not worked against them, however, with both more popular than any politician in the country.
For Mbappe and his teammates, with Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal to navigate past in Friday’s quarter-final, such neutrality is not an option. Not now.
Last Sunday, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won the first round of snap election balloting. They have already won dozens of seats and if it secures more than half the 577 in the National Assembly this Sunday, it will be able to form the first far-right government since the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.
Mbappe, Parisian-born to Cameroonian and Algerian parents, being put forward to speak to the media felt poignant. He has already spoken prior to the opener against Austria, where he urged France not to “vote for extremes”.
His appearance again was no coincidence. After the cagey victory over Austria, the French Institute of Public Opinion published a poll to gauge public political opinion.
Momentum behind Le Pen’s party had slowed, falling from 35 per cent support a week earlier to 33 per cent. The Mbappe effect?
Perhaps not, given last Sunday’s results. Desperate times, therefore, called for desperate measures.
“More than ever we have to go vote,” Mbappe urged, with politics the second question asked. “We cannot leave our country in the hands of these people. It is urgent.
“We saw the [first round] results, they were catastrophic. We really hope it changes and that everyone mobilises to vote for the good side.”
Such language is telling. Mbappe twice, Marcus Thuram, Jules Koundé and Ousmane Dembélé have spoken out, while almost 200 French sportspeople, including tennis stars Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Yannick Noah and Marion Bartoli, former athlete Marie-José Pérec, and the sailor François Gabart, signed a petition urging voters to keep National Rally out of power.
“Fear of the far right has been a huge issue in French politics for 40 years,” Simon Kuper, journalist, author of Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century and creator of Heroes & Humans podcast, tells i.
“The far right have domesticated themselves and a lot of French people don’t see them as bad guys anymore. But for the non-white population, and footballers are a huge part of that, it’s a terrifying prospect.
“Police violence is a big issue and the far right have been very encouraging, like [former US president Donald] Trump, of police doing what they want, kind of knocking heads in the suburbs. So fear of the police, of a government against black people, against Muslims, is huge.”
Taking a stand, however, is not normally part of the French footballing vernacular. While protests in France are more commonplace than in the UK, on only a handful of occasions has the country’s top players tried to tackle political extremes.
In the 1978 World Cup, Dominique Rocheteau spoke out against the human rights abuses by the ruling Argentinian junta. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father who was expelled from the party by his daughter in 2015, reached the second round of the presidential elections and Zinedine Zidane made a rare decision to discredit him. Four years later, Jean-Marie was at the centre of a race row, which irked players at the 2006 World Cup.
“Although footballers have been reluctant to speak out, what has happened in recent years in the US and the UK, footballers taking a stand over non-partisan political issues, has had an impact,” says Tom Williams, French football analyst on Canal+ and author of Va-Va Voom, The Modern History of French Football.
“A lot of French players are big fans of American sports and notice basketball or NFL players speaking out against injustice. The same with Premier League players. So when Marcus Rashford takes on the government on school meals or Raheem Sterling speaks out on racism, others in France want to step forward.
The view from many, especially on the far-right, is that Mbappe and his teammates should not be telling people how to vote, given their influence.
After Mbappe’s first stand, Bardella insisted that if “you’re lucky enough to have a very big salary, when you are a multi-millionaire… then I’m a little embarrassed to see these athletes give lessons to people who can no longer make ends meet.”
The question is, can Mbappe’s call to arms provide enough of a warning to help Marine fail to reach the top just as her father did? Quite a responsibility ahead of one of the most important matches of his life.
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