I confess that I read with a mixture of fascination and astonishment the columns that Mariano Rajoy publishes in El Debate about the World Cup. Fascination because it is a luxury to have a former Prime Minister writing about football. Astonishment because he has decided to give us a feast of obviousness.
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Rajoy turns every match into a common sense instruction manual: “You have to play well.” “It is advisable not to make mistakes.” “If you score more goals, you usually win.” One finishes the article wondering if it was a column or the back of a sugar packet.
The most surprising thing is to imagine the scene with other leaders. Can anyone picture Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Aznar, or Jordi Pujol dedicating a weekly column to stringing together this collection of clichés? It’s hard to believe. They would surely try to say something. Whether they got it right or not, they would try. Rajoy, on the other hand, seems to have found his own genre: writing a thousand words without committing to a single idea.
Until, suddenly, he did. Talking about the French national team, he wrote on Saturday: “It also has a very high-level squad. That is, without French players.”
Rajoy turns every match into a common sense instruction manual but…
Here we are no longer talking about a simple nonsense. Because that phrase has too much history behind it. It is exactly the argument that the French far right has exploited for years to deny the Frenchness of Mbappé, Dembelé, Tchouaméni, or so many footballers born in France. The old discourse that “they are not real French.” The same prejudice wrapped in the guise of a football joke.
Does Rajoy intend to be witty? He does not succeed. To provoke? Neither. What he shows is a frivolity unworthy of someone who has held the presidency of a government. Rajoy should know that there are ideas that are not casually thrown from a platform as if they were a joke over beers. Especially if that idea coincides with one of Jean Marie Le Pen’s favorite mantras.
There are former presidents who enhance the office when they leave and others who manage to diminish the memory of having held it. Rajoy’s columns do not degrade sports journalism. They degrade the idea of what a former president should contribute to public debate.
