Rajoy in sheep's clothing

If part of an columnist's strength is their ability to generate debate around their thinking, it must be recognized that Mariano Rajoy is a titan of influence. Days after his column stating that the French team did not have French people, he manages to get El País to dedicate the cover headline to him: “Storm against Rajoy in Spain and France for his «racist» article”. It is a pity that the newspaper has taken refuge in cowardly quotation marks, because the article was racist and there should be no need to resort to the subjective opinion of a source to say that if it walks like a duck, has feathers, and goes quack, it is indeed a duck. 

The debate has also awakened those who try to defend Rajoy from his racism. One of the most prominent cases is precisely that of the former deputy director of El País and currently at Abc, David Alandete, who tweeted a tribune from the Washington Post supposedly from when France won the World Cup titled “How Africa won the World Cup”. The problem is that it was actually from eight years earlier and that the article in question explained that Africa could consider itself a winner for having been able to organize the competition for the first time, even if its teams did not achieve sporting success. But beyond the slip-up, it is true that others like Nicolás Maduro or the black South African comedian Trevor Noah have expressed this idea when France was proclaimed champion. However, any message can only be rigorously decoded if one takes into account who is saying it and the intention, because that is part of the meaning. And it is one thing to claim the triumphs and cultural identity of a secularly oppressed group, and another to deny them nationality based on their skin color from a position of privilege. Rajoy embodies the cliché of the Galician you don't know if he's going up or down the stairs. But behind this vacant appearance and discursive babbling, there is someone with very clear ideas. Lamentable, of course, but clear.