RED-CARDING THE POPULISTS

We could draw some inspiration from football great Zinedine Zidane, and eject the xenophobes from our political playing field

Presidential elections start in France on April 10, so the usual shenanigans that accompany these ritualised struggles for power, influence and money are in full force.

Recently, Zinedine Zidane had to kick one of the far-right candidates out of his football club. Zidane, for the nonfootball fans among you, is a French World Cup hero, winner of the Fifa World Player of the Year award in 1998, 2000 and 2003, and most recently manager of Spanish club Real Madrid. He is also being touted as the next manager of English club Manchester United.

Zidane is also the man who, famously, ended his last-ever game, at the 2006

World Cup, with a red card for head-butting an Italian player. The player had, apparently, insulted Zidane’s sister. Esquire magazine later quoted him as saying: “If you look at the 14 red cards I had in my career, 12 of them were a result of provocation. This isn’t justification, this isn’t an excuse, but my passion, temper and blood made me react.”

All of this will remind you of the recent Oscars kerfuffle, where Will Smith slapped presenter Chris Rock for making a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Similar excuses about defending the family, the same outcry from all sides of the outrage spectrum.

A big difference, of course — and just to remind Hollywood where it stands in the greater scheme of things — was that 715-million people witnessed Zidane’s head-butt live, whereas a paltry 16.6-million saw Smith’s slap.

But this column isn’t about the fraught landscape that is the staged moral anguishing in the US. Éric Zemmour, the right-wing presidential candidate kicked out of Zidane’s football club, is standing in the election on an aggressively anti-immigration platform.

He turned up, with the obligatory camera crew, at Zidane’s five-a-side football club in Aix-en-Provence to kick the ball around with a few companions. One of Zemmour’s political team had paid the requisite fee to rent the pitch for two hours. Only, Zidane’s brother, Noureddine Zidane, kicked them out.

The Zidanes are Muslims of Algerian descent whose parents emigrated to France in 1953, before the start of the Algerian War. So you can imagine why they’d react with distaste to being set up as a publicity opportunity by someone who says unaccompanied child migrants are “thieves, killers, they’re rapists. That’s all they are. We should send them back.” And who has threatened to create a ministry of “re-immigration” that would deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants over his five-year term as president.

According to Reuters, if this right-wing bigot becomes president, he says he will go to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia “to negotiate accords for the expulsions. About 30% of French immigrants were born in one of those three countries, according to the French Institute of Demographic Studies.”

When someone asked what he would do if, understandably, African leaders laughed in his face, Zemmour told a news conference: “The heads of African countries have homes in France. We could seize them, you see. There are a number of foreigners who send money through Western Union. That’s an important part of the budgets of these countries. We can block them. I call those ways to put pressure.”

It’s disgusting stuff. I wonder what South Africans would think about this. Most of us, I think (not

all, sadly) would be outraged at this rank xenophobia, at the stereotyping of African immigrants, and people of African descent, as rapists, criminals and killers. As people defined by poverty, who are just a drain on the fiscus, flooding into France to take the jobs of ordinary, hardworking citizens.

I can imagine the likes of Herman Mashaba, or the EFF, being incandescent with rage at this racist behaviour. I mean, it’s such blatant abuse of African immigrants for political ends, without any consideration whatsoever for them as people. Who the hell do these Europeans think they are, that they can just play with the lives of people who in many cases have been forced to flee because of historical and current exploitation by the West; because of their countries being pawns in a game for dominance, the blasted sites of proxy wars between the usual suspects.

And yet. Here we are.

His Royal Excellency Commander-in-Chief Julius Malema and his crack troops visiting restaurants to check the nationality of staff — actions described by the Human Sciences Research Council as those of “a party trying to push the anti-immigrant button despite their rhetoric to the contrary”, and as “an attempt to [shore] up support within certain constituencies following a disappointing performance in the recent local government elections”.

There’s “Black Like Me, Though Not

Quite Enough If You’re Foreign” brand ambassador Mashaba, whose ActionSA is pushing big on the anti-foreigners ticket. And then there’s Operation Dudula and the Dudula Movement, which are running a campaign in Joburg targeting foreign nationals, and whose leader, Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini, was arrested and charged with housebreaking and malicious damage to property.

I won’t burden you with more examples, as you’ll have seen them all unfold in real time.

They’re a bunch of self-serving hypocrites. Journalist Richard Poplak retweeted an example of xenophobia from someone called Divine Patriot!: “Pregnant women from Zimbabwe are a very huge problem in this country & we all know it.”

You can imagine the responses. Here’s an example: “We must go Dudula them. The message must reach them in Zim they are no longer welcome here. We are fed up.”

And Lone Patriot dehumanises foreigners even more, saying: “This is not even procreating anymore, it’s breeding.”

But Poplak’s own comment was chilling. “Just an example of the relentless daily trolling in the lead-up to the coming pogroms. When there will again be tragic ‘intelligence failures’.”

Is this realistic? Will the hypocritical

The heads of African countries have homes in France. We could seize them, you see

Éric Zemmour

parties and their populist messaging push us to more violence and deaths, to the level of pogroms? Surely cooler heads will prevail?

It doesn’t look like it. Even the DA is getting in on the act, helping to ramp up the hatred. And I say “even” because, as misguided as the DA has been on many issues, you wouldn’t expect its voters to be in favour of anti-foreigner sentiment.

But, behold, a tweet from the DA in Gauteng: “Foreign embassies should be billed for patients from their countries who are treated in Gauteng hospitals. The number of foreign births at some of our hospitals is more than 25% of total births, so it is a significant burden on our public health system.”

As is usual with the DA, its attempts at populist posturing never really work for it. Hilariously, one response to the tweet is: “25% is a low figure. Are you deliberately trying to minimise the problem? ”

Poor old DA. Even when it tries to be badass, people see through it. Which, if you think about it, is actually a compliment to the DA.

Xenophobia is building — a fire fed by opportunistic politicians and people who are either desperately poor, consciously evil, or a tragic combination of both. Now it’s characterised by episodic eruptions, but in the very near future it risks becoming part of the daily fabric of life.

We need more Zidanes in this country — people to make clear choices about stopping those who peddle hatred from playing on our fields.