BERLIN — As the World Cup comes to a close, there’s one group of politicians who’ve remained unusually quiet about the fate of their own national teams: Europe’s far-right party leaders.
Top officials from France’s National Rally, the Alternative for Germany, England’s Reform UK and others faced complicated dynamics in deciding how to talk about the World Cup. The broad, socially acceptable form of patriotism inspired by international sporting events like the World Cup seems at first glance like an easy fit for parties whose core message includes a return to strong national pride.
But in many of the countries where these parties are growing, increasingly diverse teams with immigrant backgrounds are at odds with the way these parties think about national identity — making it tougher for them to vocally support the home team without implicitly supporting the individual players who are part of it.
“For the right, for whom national identification and identity has always been more salient than for the center and the left, soccer fandom was a natural conduit to express its passion and commitment,” said Andrei S. Markovits, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the intersection of sports and nationalism. “This has become a tad more difficult when the players hail from multicultural backgrounds, many of which the right sees as inferior.”
(Former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy learned the hard way how people react when someone points out those multicultural backgrounds: The center-right pol came under fire for saying ahead of Spain’s semifinal match against France that the French national team was “without Frenchmen,” a not-so-subtle dig at the African origins of many of the team’s star players.)
“It would not be good in terms of their electoral strength for [far-right parties] to be critical of these teams,” said Alan Bairner, a professor at England’s Loughborough University who has researched sports and national identity. “But the fact that they might seem a bit lukewarm is in itself a telling thing.”
That’s perhaps why criticism from far-right leaders has been directed not at their own teams, but at other teams — or at using the tournament to chime in with nationalist narratives that serve their own purposes.
Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Freedom Party, posted an image of himself in a bright-orange suit to cheer on the Dutch team in the early stages of the World Cup. It was a sharp contrast with his comments a day earlier, when he’d reposted a picture of members of the Moroccan squad praying on the field with an anti-Islam insult as the caption. (Several players of Dutch-Moroccan origin opted to play for Morocco, rather than the Netherlands this year.)
And after the Netherlands lost to Morocco in a penalty shootout late last month and post-game celebrations led to clashes with police in The Hague, Wilders — long a vocal supporter of stricter immigration controls in Europe — used the occasion to call for the deportation of all Moroccans involved in the clashes.
Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, too, used England’s semifinal match against Argentina on Wednesday to hearken back to the two countries’ 1980s-era war over the Falkland Islands: “Let’s do it all over again just like 1982,” he posted on X.
(Farage got in trouble earlier in the tournament for posting a photo of himself celebrating an England win by chugging a pint in a Three Lions jersey … only for observers to note it was a picture from the 2024 Euros.)
But in most cases, far-right leaders have swallowed their criticism of their diverse national teams and offered the basic messages of support expected of them, or in some cases, just stayed quiet.
National Rally leader Jordan Bardella, despite his past jabs at French striker Kylian Mbappé, congratulated the French team on a good run after losing to Spain earlier this week and said they “thrilled an entire nation” with their World Cup performance.
And AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla sought to downplay criticism of the German team’s diversity from within their party: Asked about one AfD state-level politician’s assertion that Germany’s national squad “has lost the quality of an authentic German national team” due to its diverse roster, both Weidel and Chrupalla were dismissive of those comments.
“If a player of an ethnic group whom you deem inferior scores goals for you, what are you going to do? Disavow him as belonging to the nation that you love?” asked Markovits. “No … you may deep down still doubt the genuine essence of his nationality, but you accept his goals and appropriate them as your own.”