France Rebukes Mariano Rajoy For Saying There Are No French Men In French Team

 France has rejected former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s claim that its national football team had “no French players.”

The French Embassy in Spain said on Sunday that “all the players in the French national team are French,” noting that this also applied to the three members of the 26-man squad who were born abroad.

The response came after Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister from 2011 to 2018 and former leader of the

centre-right Partido Popular (PP), wrote in an opinion piece for Spanish news website El Debate that France’s national team had no French players.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told French channel BFMTV that Rajoy’s comment was “absolutely unacceptable”.

The two countries are to play on Tuesday in a blockbuster World Cup semi-final.

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, condemned the remark as “xenophobic”.

“There are those who still measure belonging by surname, place of birth, or skin colour. Others measure it by our roots in a country and our will to contribute to it,” the Socialist leader wrote on X.

“Spain belongs to those who love it and work for it. Not to those who shame it with xenophobic statements.”

French politicians have also condemned Rajoy’s comment.

France “has no skin colour or religion”, said French Socialist party leader Olivier Faure on X.

Île-de-France regional president Valérie Pécresse, a centre-right politician who belongs to the same European political family as Rajoy, described the comments as “despicable racism”.

“Mariano Rajoy demonstrates his complete misunderstanding of what constitutes the soul of the French people.”

Naima Moutchou, France’s minister for overseas territories, called the comments evidence of “systematic and widespread hatred of France and what the nation is”.“Every time Les Bleus win, the same racist obsessions and insults re-emerge,” she said.

The comments sparked further controversy after Kylian Mbappé, the captain of the French team, was targeted with hate speech by a Paraguayan lawmaker following Paraguay’s defeat to France last week.

Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla described the star player as “a colonised Cameroonian who has really pretended to be French”.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/france-rebukes-ex-spanish-pm-over-no-french-players-claim/