Kylian Mbappé’s remarkable rise to the niche on the death of Nahel, the young man killed by police fire near Paris, and on the riots that followed, confirm the concern for national harmony of the star striker of the France team. and PSG, which flirts with politics without committing.
“I feel bad about my France. An unacceptable situation. All my thoughts are with Nahel’s family and loved ones, this little angel who left much too soon”. Social networks are racing last Wednesday when Kylian Mbappé publishes this tweet in the direction of his 12.6 million subscribers.
A few hours before the words of Emmanuel Macron, who will denounce the “inexplicable” and “inexcusable” act of the policeman who killed the young 17-year-old from a working-class district of Nanterre during a traffic check, the word of the footballer is a first spur to public opinion.
Then on Friday, in a pendulum movement with consummate timing, he relays with several other players of the France team an open letter which is addressed directly to the rioters by brandishing the value of “living together” in the face of attacks against town halls. , police stations, schools, looting of businesses and burning of cars, among others.
“It is your property that you are destroying, your neighborhoods, your cities, your places of fulfillment and proximity”, he says at the height of these troubles which are shaking the whole country before starting to decrease in intensity on Sunday. .
Even more than in the past, “it is a break from the duty of reserve that athletes usually impose on themselves”, notes political scientist Rémi Lefèbvre, professor at the University of Lille.
And some Internet users had fun making montages of Kylian Mbappé as President of the Republic.
Emmanuel Macron, for several years, has not been mistaken, staging a special relationship with the star. With sometimes mixed success, as when he went down to the lawn to console him after the defeat in the final of the World Cup in December.
Kylian Mbappé was also able to play it, saying last year that he took the president’s “good advice” on his extension to PSG … before refuting this influence on a new extension a year later.
The attacker is not at his first attempt in the expression on the news. The themes of police violence and racism are definitely close to his heart, since he was moved by the fate of Michel Zecler, music producer beaten up by police in November 2020.
But he also ventures to broaden his field. During the pandemic, he publishes a photo of his vaccination, as an incentive to the refractory, then many.
Nevertheless, if Mbappé brewed last week the questions of “social policy, urban planning and security”, he “does not express a political questioning”, decrypts Pierre Lefébure, specialist in political communication from the University Sorbonne-Paris North.
Becoming a political figure is not his goal anyway. Asked by AFP, the entourage of the Parisian player did not wish to make any comment on the subject.
Mbappé is not Socrates, the Brazilian player of the 70s and 80s, who confronted the dictatorship in his country and urged his fellow footballers to take up political issues.
Unlike a Lilian Thuram, or even his teammates Aurélien Tchouaméni and Jules Koundé, very offensive, “with Mbappé we are not in the normative, but in moral and ethical considerations to make society”, explains Pierre Lefébure.
According to him in short, while “the common good was brutally fractured” with the death of Nahel and then the riots, the star’s intervention “aims more to return to a normal previous state” than to propose a new horizon.
A form of consensus, even conservatism that could play tricks on him. His position on ecology and climate? The general public held back their giggles in September when their PSG coach Christophe Galtier mocked a question about club travel in polluting private jets.
Gay rights flouted by World Cup host Qatar? Yet requested by several associations, Kylian Mbappé remained silent, while Antoine Griezmann, he proclaimed that the LGBTQI community “would always have (his) support”.
No “excess of function” of the star therefore, slips into a smile the political scientist Pierre Lefébure. The attacker plays the defense of a national solidarity undermined by the news.
05/07/2023 10:09:46 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
