"They don't have any French players." That's what former Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy wrote in a World Cup column on Friday — and the fallout has been swift, loud, and entirely predictable.
Rajoy, who led Spain from 2011 to 2018, was previewing the Spain-France semi-final for online newspaper El Debate when he dropped the line. He acknowledged France's World Cup pedigree — two-time champions, ranked No. 1 by FIFA, unbeaten in this tournament — and then undermined the whole thing with a remark that has drawn immediate comparisons to Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla's recent racist attack on Kylian Mbappé, in which she called him a "colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself off as French."
Political fallout on both sides of the border
Spain's current prime minister Pedro Sánchez didn't mince words. "There are those who still measure belonging by surname, place of birth, or skin colour," he wrote on X. He ended with a cordial but pointed message for France: "May the best team win and may racism lose."
The response from France was equally sharp. Interior minister Laurent Nuñez called the remarks "completely unacceptable." French Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel said Rajoy "cannot help but spew filthy racism." France's minister for overseas territories, Naïma Moutchou, went further — she called this pattern "methodical and normalised hatred" and urged the French football federation, which has already filed a complaint over Amarilla's tirade, to "pursue all legal avenues" in response to Rajoy's column too.
Olivier Faure, leader of the French Socialist party, made the legal point simply: the squad is composed entirely of French citizens. Passport check: they're all French. The argument doesn't require much more than that.
What this means beyond the politics
Strip away the diplomatic language and this is the same recycled argument that surfaces every time France wins anything. The same team that Rajoy himself concedes is ranked No. 1 in the world, has won every game in this tournament, and represents a "formidable opponent" — is also somehow not French enough to count. The contradiction sits right there in his own paragraph.
For the match itself, France head into the semi-final as favourites in the betting markets, and controversies like this tend to galvanise rather than distract elite squads. If anything, Rajoy may have handed Les Bleus a bulletin board moment.
Moutchou's assessment cuts through it all: "These aren't just slips of the tongue. It's a methodical and normalised hatred of France and what it represents."
