It is the countdown to the World Cup, and so with impeccable timing, the Le Pen cabal in French politics and media has declared war on the football superstar Kylian Mbappé, captain of Les Bleus, international sporting legend and perhaps the most admired Frenchman in the world. His crime? Daring to reiterate his opposition to the extreme right.
From the Rassemblement National (RN) presidential contender Jordan Bardella to Marine Le Pen, and across the broadcast empire of the crusading, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré, a vicious assault has been launched against the star striker, suggesting he should shut his trap and stick to football. It is a campaign of denigration and barely-disguised xenophobia reminiscent of the worst race-baiting of the former Front National’s founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Tant pis that 27-year-old Mbappé helped deliver the World Cup to France in a blistering tournament in 2018, scored a hat-trick in the 2022 World Cup final and has become one of the country’s greatest icons. Yet again, he is at the receiving end of a torrent of race-soaked online attacks.
His “crime”? Being so “uppity” as to touch on his long-held concerns about far-right extremism and the dangers it poses to France. He did so in a lengthy interview in Vanity Fair, a month out from the World Cup and a year before presidential elections in France, which the hard right RN is tipped to win.
First out of the blocks was Bardella, the party leader. The 30-year-old TikTok influencer is a failed university student and European Parliament absentee – away 77% of the time. His main jobs in life, apart from cultivating his online brand, have been serving the Le Pen machine and according to an investigation siphoning off €133,000 in taxpayer-funds from the European Parliament for media coaching.
In response to a Bolloré, CNews post citing Mbappé’s interview, Bardella trolled the national hero over his move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid. He posted on X: “I know what happens when Kylian Mbappé leaves PSG: the club wins the Champions League! (And maybe even a second time soon.)”
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Marine Le Pen also jumped in, echoing young Jordan and remarking that “when Kylian Mbappé says he doesn’t want us to win the elections, it reassures me… the French are free enough to vote for whoever they want without being influenced by Monsieur Mbappé”. In this remark “the French” does not seem to include Mbappé.
“Mbappé has been put in his place by Bardella and Le Pen,” said conspiracy rag Boulevard Voltaire, mocking the footballer for imagining himself as “more than just a pair of legs chasing a ball”.
Mbappé, who has a mother of Algerian background and a father who immigrated from Cameroon, was even labelled a “recidivist” – in other words a criminal – on public broadcaster France Info, for once again expressing a political opinion.
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This disgraceful commentary also has an edge of absurdity to it, as Mbappé was not even explicitly talking about the 2027 presidential election.
The Vanity Fair profile was in fact looking back to the snap legislative elections of 2024. Back then the French footballer Marcus Thuram called for a “daily fight” against the RN, as Mbappé warned it would be “catastrophic” if they won and that, “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.”
“It was something that shocked us,” says Mbappé in Vanity Fair. “We are citizens, and we couldn’t just sit there and tell ourselves everything is going to be fine and go play. We truly try to fight this idea that a footballer should shut up and play.”
Later in the profile he adds: “People sometimes think that because you have money, because you’re famous, that kind of problem doesn’t affect you. But it affects me, because I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control.”
The coordinated reaction from the RN ecosystem and the Bolloré media behemoth quickly exploded into jealous jibes at Mbappé’s wealth, his “privilege”, false claims about his tax status and allegations he was “insulting” RN voters and French citizens.
Bardella remarked: “I am always extremely uncomfortable seeing multimillionaires travelling by private jet handing out lessons in morality, and lecturing millions of French people who can no longer make ends meet.”
On CNews, the RN spokesman Julien Odoul accused Mbappé of “despising millions of French people” including RN’s 13 million voters.
Geoffroy Lejeune, editor of Bolloré’s Sunday newspaper, demanded that France coach Didier Deschamps refuse to select Mbappé for the World Cup. Deschamps commented at a press conference that Mbappé had the right to “free expression”.
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This racially-coloured cacophony is hardly new. In 2022 Bardella referred to Mbappé as a model of “successful assimilation”, a comment heavy with colonialist condescension. Back in 1996, Jean-Marie Le Pen railed that it was “artificial to bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team”, while complaining that too many of France’s footballers supposedly did not sing or even know La Marseillaise.
Two years later, after France won the World Cup, Le Pen continued jeering at the multicultural makeup of the squad, unable to accept that millions of Black and Arab French citizens were just as French as anyone else. In 2006 he said there were too many “players of colour”.
It is the same politics that exploded around French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura before the Paris Olympics, when Le Pen led the charge over her supposed “poor French” and decried her performing at the Opening Ceremony.
Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal has stripped away all the pretence and dragged Mbappé into her family’s rancid politics of blood and soil, declaring that there was something “illegitimate” about political opinions coming from someone who no longer lives in France and who lectures “millions of French people”.
There it was at last: the insinuation that Mbappé is not really French. Beneath the influencer branding and the attempted modernisation of the Le Pen movement there lurks the same old dog-whistle politics. Mbappé is French enough to win a World Cup for France – but in their view, he is not French enough to speak.
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