Russia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey out of the… balls of the football Euro. Eliminate. For it strange and unpredictable game of crossed destinies, the football (and propaganda) of these illiberal countries has failed dramatically. Not only. With the collapse of Slovakia too, three quarters of the Visegrad Pact – a loose cannon of destabilization in the European Union – has been shattered, all mercilessly taken by the cameras live broadcasting from the stadiums.
Where politics has failed, the football that has a has won immense emotional impact on spectators and fans. With what follows, starting with the battle between the Europe of democratic values and sovereignty, expressed with highly symbolic gestures (the kneeling, the headbands and the lighting of the stadiums with the colors of the rainbow) that the UEFA managed by the Slovenian Aleksander Ceferin is fighting and trying to prevent by setting up hypocritical alibis: “We are a neutral organization at a political and religious level”. Instead, day after day, the invasions of politics and the struggle for human rights have been more and more numerous. And more courageous. In short, the most significant goals of these hectic weeks were scored by the strikers who broke the windows of Putin, Orban, Morawiecki and Erdogan. These have been shots… left-handed! It is a pity that the EU, NATO and Joe Biden do not have such effective strikers.
TheUkraine. In the face of Putin. He would have liked to have his players wear a jersey with the map of the country on it that includes Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014, but UEFA said that the map had to be removed, while the motto embroidered inside the collar could remain, “Glory to the Heroes “. Kiev he wanted to denounce Putin’s abuses to public opinion and to that ball, the battle for the “political shirt”, although lost, was paradoxically won because everyone talked about it. That was the intended purpose.
Per Viktor Orban, the setback is even more painful, he feels himself the king of Hungarian football (as a young man he was a decent amateur footballer), he has solemnly declared several times that he wants to give Hungary back its illustrious past, at the cost of pharaonic investments, tax exemptions and European credits. The team coached by the Italian Rossi drew proudly with the French world champions, with the Germans, but it was not enough. In fact, he lost ruinously to the Portuguese, a landslide caused by the own goal, at the end of the game, of the defender who is called… Orban. At the registry office, Vilmos Tamàs known as Willi, a German player who plays in Leipzig and was a naturalized Hungarian.
The unfortunate Willi Orban repeated himself against Germany. He betrayed thename of that the premier of Budapest hoped to wave. The head of the Hungarian government who has just passed laws that are widely believed discriminatory (the latest, against “homosexual propaganda”), loves football so much that in the village of Felcsut, where he spent his childhood, he built a small stadium. It can accommodate 3,816 people, actually more than double the number of inhabitants. Only a road separates him from Orban’s country house: a tiraccio and the ball falls in the garden… next to the stadium there are eleven other training fields, for young people who attend the Puskas Akadémia. According to the site 24.hu, the foundation that runs the Felcsut club would receive 32.2 billion of florins (90 million euros) through complex financial mechanisms …
Nor can Erdogan rejoice, in power for 19 years. Days ago, in an interview that came out on The print last June 10, the writer Esmahan Aykol (has published a story in the anthology Football in yellow, Sellerio editions, 2016), was succinct: “In Turkey the whole system is built around the corruption and to frode and football does not escape this logic which in the last ten years has worn down the country (…) in Turkey football is yet another institutionalized religion ”. Football, says Aykol, is “continually used as propaganda”, in a context of “hybrid Islamic-fascism” and “primitive ideas”. Under the banner ofcall to prayer (prayer). Of the flag (flag). Of the varan (The fatherland). A bombing of slogans. Luckily, every now and then football rebels. Even losing three out of three games. As did Turkey, the bottom of the class.
