France’s far right didn’t drop its grudge against Les Bleus. It recast it.

 

France’s far right didn’t drop its grudge against Les Bleus. It recast it.

 

What was once an attack on immigration and identity has become an attack on privilege and elitism — a shift that mirrors the party’s path toward the presidency.

 

July 5, 2026 7:29 am CET

By Sasha Issenberg

https://www.politico.eu/article/frances-far-right-didnt-drop-its-grudge-against-les-bleus-it-recast-it/

 

France’s national football team has become an unlikely barometer for the country’s leading far-right party, whose leaders’ shifting rhetoric about the team reflects its broader attempts at moderation — from appeals around racial identity to working-class solidarity — and helps explain why the National Rally is now seen as having a genuine shot at the presidency after decades of falling short.

 

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party known during his lifetime as the National Front, became perhaps the most vocal domestic antagonist of France’s football team as it emerged as an international force in the 1990s. After the country assembled a formidable squad led by nonwhite players with heritage from across its former colonial holdings, Le Pen disowned them as “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.”

 

“It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’” Le Pen said in 1996, words he repeated even after the team won the World Cup two years later. “They put an Algerian in to please the Arabs, a Kanak who can’t even sing the national anthem, blacks to satisfy the Antillais. None of them has any place in a French team.”

 

As Marine Le Pen prepared to succeed her father as leader of the party, she echoed his critique of the team as an example of France’s new migrants refusing to assimilate, calling the 2010 World Cup squad a collection of “ethnic, religious clans that are creating a sort of apartheid within the team itself.”

 

“Most of these people consider themselves as representatives of France one minute, when they’re at the World Cup,” she said in a television interview at the time. “But the next, they feel like they belong to another country or have another nationality in their hearts.”

 

As France’s governing parties weakened over the 2010s, Le Pen saw an opportunity to win support from traditional center-right constituencies. She insisted her party was “not racist,” ejected her father after he repeated statements denying the Holocaust, and rebranded the movement under a friendlier National Rally (RN) banner.

 

Even if she was not ready to be a fan of the French national team — Le Pen conceded she “knows absolutely nothing about football” and expressed a preference for rugby — she was ready to abandon her father’s loud tradition of naysaying its successes.

 

“It’s hard for the RN and far-right wing to be as blatantly critical of Les Bleus when the team has represented the nation well over the last decade in both their on- and off-pitch endeavors,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who teaches at New York University’s Robert Preston Tisch Institute for Global Sport and is author of two books on sports in France.

 

When France won a World Cup for the second time, in 2018, Le Pen made her target not the champions themselves but politicians who latched on to the team’s successes. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who had defeated her for the presidency a year earlier, “should focus on the policies being implemented in France, about which there is much to say, and let Les Bleus go all the way to victory,” she told an interviewer. Sporting success, added Le Pen, “won’t make worries disappear, it won’t make the dangers of insecurity and terrorism disappear, it won’t make the financial struggles disappear.”

 

It was part of a broader redirection of far-right resentments away from race and ethnicity to class and status, embodied by the yellow-vest protests that began months after that World Cup victory. Le Pen began to speak of France’s most famous athletes the way her father once dismissed Paris’ detached elites — “technocratic robots, graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, and bourgeois bohemians,” he said in a 2006 address to a party convention — rather than as ungrateful immigrants representing the country’s restive suburbs.

 

The populist shift was evident in 2024, when several of the team’s top strikers all joined a swift counterattack against the National Rally following its gains in regional elections. French captain Kylian Mbappé called the outcome “catastrophic” and cautioned that “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.”

 

“When you have the luck to have a huge salary, be a multimillionaire, the chance to travel in a private jet, I am a little annoyed to see these sports figures giving lessons to people who struggle to make ends meet,” Jordan Bardella, a Le Pen protégé then leading the National Rally, responded to Mbappé.

 

Now Bardella and Le Pen are waiting to see who will be the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections, a choice likely to be shaped by a looming court decision this week about Le Pen’s eligibility to run due to an embezzlement conviction. Polls show either candidate would be in a strong position to win the presidency.

 

The two party leaders disagree on plenty of policy and political questions, but when it comes to France’s national team — now seen as favorites to again lift the World Cup trophy — Bardella and Le Pen are united in their messaging.

 

“This tendency of actors, footballers and singers to tell the French how they should vote — particularly those earning 1,300 to 1,400 euros a month, while they themselves are millionaires or even billionaires — is starting to be very poorly received in our country,” Le Pen said after Mbappé stood by his anti-RN comments in a widely discussed Vanity Fair interview published just before the World Cup began.

 

“Those people who are fortunate enough to live well, to be protected from insecurity, poverty and unemployment,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”