Politics
The ex-France player who swapped blue for green
BRUSSELS — Destroying the EU’s environmental policies to boost manufacturing and keep Europe competitive with China and the U.S. is a mistake, says former Arsenal player and French international soccer player Mathieu Flamini.
Instead, the athlete, who is now the CEO of a France-based chemicals company, says the bloc should double down on moving away from fossil fuels, arguing that weakening rules like the EU’s Emissions Trading System would not solve Europe’s competitiveness problem.
“The reality is, if we believe we’re going to remove the carbon tax in Europe and suddenly we’re gonna be competitive with China or other [regions], we’re lying to ourselves,” Flamini told Blue Light News in an interview.
Flamini co-founded GF Biochemicals in 2013, the same year he returned to north London to play for Arsenal for the second time, after a five-year stint in Italy with AC Milan.
Flamini won three caps for the French team, making his debut in 2007 against Morocco — a potential quarterfinal opponent for France at this World Cup. His company turns agricultural waste into bio-based chemicals used in everyday items such as paints, cosmetics and cleaning products.
The Frenchman believes the European chemicals industry, already under pressure from soaring energy prices and geopolitical shocks such as the Iran crisis, needs to accept its inevitable transition from fossil fuel-based ingredients towards bio-based alternatives.
The case against fossil fuels is two-pronged: They pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2; and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy.
“We have to embrace and accept that there is an evolution like any other industry, from combustion engine to electric engine; [in the] chemical industry, from a petrol-based industry to bio-based,” said Flamini.
But that’s easier said than done. Lawmakers and member countries are already looking for ways to weaken the ETS, or even scrap it altogether. At a ministers’ meeting in Brussels last month, a handful of member countries raised concerns over the impact of carbon pricing on their industries during a meeting of EU economy ministers.
Read the full interview by Blue Light News’s Jakob Weizman here.
France’s national soccer 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 soccer 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 teamwon 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 banner (abbreviated as RN in French).
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 isauthor of two books onsports 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 theyellow-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 2004, when several of theteam’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 alooming 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 leadersdisagree 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 commentsin 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,” shetold BLN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”
Demonstrators donning the logo and insignia of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, were seen protesting in the Eastern Market neighborhood and on Capitol Hill on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Sporting white masks, sunglasses and Patriot Front’s signature tan caps, the protesters carried Confederate, Patriot Front and upside-down U.S. flags as they marched through Capitol Hill. The group was also photographed riding public transit on Saturday morning.
Outside Union Station, demonstrators chanted phrases including “Life, liberty, victory!” and “Reclaim America!” — slogans regularly used by the group.
The demonstration unfolded as tourists and Americans alike flocked to the “Salute to America” celebration on the National Mall, which will culminate in a speech by President Donald Trump and a fireworks show expected to last for a record-breaking 40 minutes. The Trump administration has made the nation’s 250th anniversary a top priority over the past few months through high-profile initiatives like the Great American State Fair and restoration work at the Reflecting Pool.
Later, anti-Trump demonstrators were filmed walking toward the White House carrying a large Declaration of Independence banner and chanting “8647,” a slogan calling for Trump’s removal from the presidency.
Patriot Front was founded in 2017 by Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who split from the alt-right organization Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Patriot Front’s website describes the group as a “fraternal, nationalist, activist organization” and writes that “Our people, born to this nation of our European race, must reforge themselves as a new collective capable of asserting our right to cultural independence.”
The D.C. mayor’s office referred Blue Light News to the Metropolitan police department for comment.
“The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is tracking First Amendment activities that occurred this morning in the Eastern Market neighborhood,” the department said in a statement Saturday. “MPD recognizes the rights of individuals to peacefully express their views and remains committed to maintaining public safety and security for DC residents and visitors.”
Gregory Svirnovskiy contributed to this report.
The Trump administration on Saturday launched its newborn investment program, called “Trump Accounts,” opening the federal savings accounts for millions of children in line with America’s 250th anniversary. Trump Accounts are available to anyone with a Social Security number under the age of 18. Qualifying children born between Jan 1…
Read More
- Demonstrators in white supremacist attire protest on Capitol Hill
- France’s far right didn’t drop its grudge against Les Blues. It recast it.
- Conservatives rage over re-funding of Planned Parenthood
- The ex-France player who swapped blue for green
- Trump’s $1K investment accounts roll out for eligible newborns
- The Great American Betrayal
- Trump’s $1K investment accounts roll out for eligible newborns
- It’s Canadian soccer’s first rodeo
- Morocco vs. Canada is a clash of diasporas
- The populist trick that turned a soccer shirt into a campaign uniform
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship10 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words