The PP believes that all the controversy over the words of Mariano Rajoy about the French men’s national football team is part of a misunderstanding. According to the main opposition party, there is no “racism,” but rather, when the former Prime Minister said that France plays “without Frenchmen,” he was making a sarcastic joke “without bad intentions.”
This was stated by the national spokesperson of the ‘populars’, Borja Sémper, at the press conference following the meeting of the PP’s Steering Committee. “To play on the French national team you have to be French. It is a phrase more typical of Mr. Rajoy than of me,” he pointed out, smiling, realizing that he had fallen into a tautology more typical of the former president.
“Those who will give the best response will be our footballers when they win decisively”
- Editorial: CARLOS FRESNEDA (Correspondent)Paris
“The columns Rajoy writes are sarcastic and without bad intentions, they are comments in favor of Spain and I would subscribe to this interpretation, I would not give it another,” the PP spokesperson wanted to conclude.
In his opinion column Today came the revenge, in El Debate, Rajoy spoke about Belgium’s elimination and Spain’s future opponent in the semifinals to be played in Dallas next Tuesday. He described the French team as a rival of “very high level” and a “formidable adversary” and added: “That is, without Frenchmen.”
Political dust
In France, Rajoy’s words have stirred significant political dust. “With every victory of the bleus the same obsessions and racist insults reappear. They are not simple ‘slips.’ It is a methodical and banalized hatred towards France and what it is,” criticized the Overseas Minister, Naïma Moutchou (from the Horizons party), inviting the French Football Federation to take “legal actions.”
Aurore Bergé, minister in charge of the Fight against Discrimination, from the Renaissance party, criticized the “repeated racist slips”: “It is time for them to stop and for sport to be sport again: a place where people are judged by their talent and by no other criteria.” When interviewed also by BFMTV, the Interior Minister, Laurent Núñez, considered that if those statements “are accurate,” they are “absolutely unacceptable.”
This Monday, EL MUNDO revealed the first reaction of the former president himself: “I am not going to stoop to the level of certain members of the Spanish government.” He was referring to the words of the Spanish minister Óscar Puente, who called him a “corrupt post-Franco blockhead.”
According to the former president’s circle, he had “no bad intentions” in his words, and considers that expression a “minor issue” that has been magnified by the response it has generated on both sides of the Pyrenees.
Finally, and to spice up the polemic a little more, Borja Sémper reproached the Prime Minister for saying “may the best win” the semifinal: “Sánchez says may the best win. We want Spain to win. Even if they play worse.”
