Tenuous
Politics Football World Cup 2018: Semi-final !
France v Belgium
T
he clash of
two impressive that border each other should be a fascinating clash
tonight. Although some of us are stick
with the bombardment of the inaccurate slogan “Football’s coming home” over
this week another slogan may be aired tonight: “France is Back”.
This has been
used by technocratic capitalism’s dream politician Emmanuel Macron who despite
his electoral victory in 2017 is now plunging new levels of unpopularity. He has faced protest from many sectors of
society – public sector workers, students, farmers and pensioners have all
taken to the streets in the last few weeks against his “reforms”. He is seeking some reflected glory from the
football team and will attend the match tonight.
The French
team need some redemption Euro 2016 was held there despite the permanent state
of emergency. This has now been lifted
but much of the police powers are still in place. France lost in the final in Paris against a
fairly limited Portugal team.
They are now
reliant on a band of young exciting players mainly from les banlieues – the poor
suburbs of Paris where there are multi-cultural immigrant communities. The biggest star so far is M’Bappe who comes from the “Bondy” and is a local
hero there where his Cameroon born Dad also used to play. The Premier League stars and key French players Pogba (whose brothers play for Guinea) and Kante
(parents from Mali) also come from les banlieus.
This
positivity only temporarily covers the racism which is still rife in many sections of French
society though. There has been riots in
Nantes (see above) after the police (armed in France) shot dead an unarmed young
North African immigrant last week. One
of the stars of France Griezmann had to apologise for posing in “blackface”
make up last December ( an offensive image see below). A crassly insensitive move for a French
player against his teammates and indeed the whole of France where the National Front polled over 10 million votes against Macron.
Hopefully if
France are victorious it can help fight the racist anti-immigrant feelings in
France – like the 98 team of Zidane victory did if only for a short while.
No comments:
Post a Comment