While the Euros Bring Elections Center Field, F1’s European Summer Turns a Blind Eye
With a far-right wave spreading over Europe, where does Formula 1 come in? American politics.
The 90-minute mark neared in the game between Austria and Poland on a Friday in June. Crimson red dotted the Berlin stadium as Austria’s resident striker Marko Arnautović nestled the ball into Poland’s goal for the third time. But before the two teams could shake hands and hang up their cleats after their first tournament appearance, a sheet unfurled in the crowd.
It read “Defend Europe.”
The slogan calls the Identitarian Movement, an anti-immigration and far-right nationalist political ideology with supporters across Europe, home.
As the Union of European Football Association (UEFA or, more commonly known as, the Euros) and Copa América games, along with the Olympic trials, occupy sports fans’ minds and calendars for the next two months, far-right politics dominate European and American elections.
At Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix, the only banners on display read messages of support for fans’ favorite drivers: a collage of larger-than-life cardboard cutouts, “inside” jokes between fans and drivers and a few marriage proposals.
The race neared the midpoint in F1’s European summer season. While Montreal split a seamless European schedule, sliding between Monaco and Spain, the sport’s 20 drivers will travel across one continent until September.
Yet, while the Euros turns into a political battleground, F1 has started the European season without a protest in sight.
National identity is at the forefront of sports: fans paint their faces with Croatia’s red-and-white checkered flag, athletes mouth national anthems and the idea of succeeding — whether scoring a goal or floating over a hurdle — isn’t just for a team, but for a nation.
It’s no different in Formula 1. Charles Leclerc crossed the finish line first at the Monaco Grand Prix in May while his eyes, blurry from crying, scanned his home crowd. His on-track battle with his teammate in Barcelona cost Carlos Sainz a home race podium. Both Ferrari drivers are considered honorary Italians.
But F1 lacks the kind of national quarrel that the Euros sees with each game: pitting two countries against each other (whether allies or warring nations) and (often contentiously) selecting 622 players to become the faces of 24 nations, many of them non-white with immigrant parents.
While The Guardian coined the Euros a “barometer of diversity,” F1 isn’t representative in wealth, race or nationality.
Three British drivers and two Australians make up the F1 grid while Alex Albon, born in London, drives under the Thai flag. Zhou Guanyu is the first Chinese F1 driver and Sergio “Checo” Perez is the only Mexican driver. The closest the sport comes to a nationality dispute is Belgium and the Netherlands playing tug-of-war over Max Verstappen’s national identity: born an hour outside of Brussels but competing for Holland.
While many Euros and Copa América players are drawn to speak publicly about politics based on their upbringing, plucked from poverty to play in the big leagues, it's more common for F1 drivers to have a parent who bankrolls their million-dollar dream.
A driver paying his/her way through the sport’s feeder series can expect to cough up $1.5 million for one season of Formula 3 alone. When Lewis Hamilton joined the series in 2007, he became the first Black Formula 1 driver and was one of few who didn’t grow up with a cushion of cash. In 17 years, the Brit has remained the only Black driver.
In contrast, nearly half of England’s Euros team is Black. The team’s Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze both have Nigerian parents who immigrated to London while center-back Marc Guéhi was born in West Africa.
Historically a pool of well-funded white athletes, F1 is homogenous and is only now inching towards its DEI goals with driver academies helping to finance young athletes’ careers.
For soccer, diverse players and an election year only amplify the voices yelling “Defend Europe.” The pitch, now a political debate stage, sees not just fans, but also players attempt to set an agenda, ranging from far-left to far-right.
Kylian Mbappé encouraged young fans to vote and fellow French player Marcus Thuram was outspoken in opposition to the nationalist right-wing National Rally political party that toppled the current centrist party and outperformed the New Popular Front socialist party in the first round of elections on Sunday.
In Wednesday’s Germany vs. Turkey game, the latter country’s center-back celebrated a game-winning goal with a “wolf salute,” causing the UEFA to open an investigation into the symbol that is tied to Turkey’s far-right and ultra-nationalist political party.
A similar pattern is happening in other games while spectators have diverging opinions on whether athletes have a responsibility to speak publicly about politics.
As Substack writer and journalist
, author of , wrote ahead of Germany’s first Euros Group Stage match against Scotland, “As Germans dream of a Euro 2024 summer fairytale, the rise of a far-right political party and its ultranationalist ideology threatens to turn it into a political nightmare.”“German football has never shied away from political affiliations. Many of the country’s top clubs boast unabashedly left-wing fanbases, while others diverge to the right. While some of these clubs maintain extremist elements, many of the clubs from Berlin’s football community joined the mass demonstrations against the AfD party, many of them carrying slogans such as ‘No football for fascists!’ and ‘Football welcomes refugees.’”
The prediction became a reality and extended further than Germany into Austria and the rest of Europe. “Defend Europe” became not just a chant or a banner as the first round of election results filtered in.
In Austria’s European Parliamentary elections earlier this month, the far-right party, FPOe, took 25.7 percent of the vote, the largest of any other political party in the country. The party leader Herbert Kickl and current Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer aim to stop the flow of “illegal migration,” according to The Guardian.
Even in nations where the right is crumbling, nationalist sentiment remains strong.
On Thursday as Americans celebrated their independence, British voters took to the ballot boxes. The nation’s once-dominant Conservative Party, gaining continued support last election cycle for Britain's exit from the European Union, collapsed as the Labour Party’s left politics prioritizing taxing the one percent and socializing wealth led the polls. Still, nationalism holds a heavy hand over the election, with most conservative voters switching support to the Reform Party’s anti-immigration agenda.
The same is true overseas.
The U.S. and Mexico, both failing to succeed in the Copa América group stages, circle each other on the field and in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. President Joe Biden and Trump’s policies on Mexico are expected to determine who will take office.
On June 27, both Biden and Trump addressed a splintering nation from the debate stage. Both made statements about immigration that weren’t backed by facts. While Trump said migrants are crossing the border from “mental institutions” and “insane asylums,” Biden said the nation was home to the “safest border in history.”
Their immigration policies never had the chance to be shouted from the grandstands or printed onto banners as both nations were struck from the tournament before they could play each other.
Drivers, unlike soccer players, are refraining from publicly straying left or right as their home countries’ elections play out. As a red wave sweeps the U.S., the country’s nationalist fanaticism seems to be washing ashore across the Atlantic as F1 becomes a global stage for American politicians.
F1 owner Liberty Media’s prioritization of everything Americana threatens to put the 2024 U.S. campaign trail on track. In Miami, former president Donald Trump supported Lando Norris from the McLaren garages, arm slinked around the race winner as crowds stood in the stifling heat chanting “U.S.A!” The Miami Grand Prix did, however, shut down a Trump fundraiser reportedly planned in a VIP suite.
The political public relations role the sport is taking on, whether consciously or not, is a curious one: just one of F1’s 20 drivers is American, with family political ties that are unflattering in the light of present day.
Logan Sargeant’s uncle and former Top Gun pilot, Harry Sargeant III, was tangled in Trump’s impeachment trial. The former finance chair of Florida’s Republican Party was not accused of anything concrete. But according to Politico, “He orbited Trump by associating with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born businessmen who worked with Rudy Giuliani on back-channel foreign policy initiatives in Ukraine.” Sargeant’s dad was also accused by Sargeant III of misappropriating $6.5 million in business funds to pay for his two sons’ karting careers.
Most drivers and teams shy away from talking politics, labeling themselves “apolitical.” In McLaren’s response to Trump’s appearance in Florida, the team said “McLaren is a non-political organization however we recognize and respect the office of President of the United States.”
Few drivers, however, are outspoken. In 2020, half of the F1 grid knelt during the national anthem in Austria after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Hamilton wore a Black Lives Matter shirt while every other driver opted for “End Racism.”
Following an uptick in political statements on track, the sport’s ruling body outlawed religious, personal and political statements without prior approval in 2023. When drivers protested the ban, Hamilton saying he simply would not follow it, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) clarified that statements were banned on track and during pre- and post-race activities. Competitors were free to protest away from the track.
McLaren — and F1 — welcoming Trump with open arms begs the question of whether a politician’s presence can be interpreted as a political statement alone. The team’s papaya orange garage held no banners promoting a presidential candidate or pushing a specific policy, but a quick picture was all fans needed to link Norris with Trump’s beliefs, even if Norris is British, not American.
As political statements hang from the crossbar and sit loudly under stadium lights, it all trickles down to whose speech is protected. UEFA bans all political statements during a game, similar to the FIA policy. The umbrella rule silences fans and athletes highlighting injustice.
When speech is censored, democracy is at risk. Political protests in sport can be essential to human rights movements: like when Tommie Smith and John Carlos held up their fists at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. Or in March, when Ukraine played Bosnia just north of Sarajevo, and a chorus of fans, clad in blue and yellow, held up banners reading “RUSSIA IS A TERRORIST STATE” and, in a reminder of the Bosnian Serb Army’s massacre of Muslim men and boys in 1995, “UN Still Useless. Srebrenica 1995. Ukraine Now.”
But policies like the UEFA and the FIA’s ban on political statements have a silver lining: also promising to prevent hate speech — a freedom that isn’t protected — even if that promise is unfulfilled.
The intersection of sports and politics, using one as a medium to talk about the other, has always fascinated me.
In my high school’s Model United Nations club, I represented the Brazilian delegation, an assignment that had me grinning as I thought of the Brazilian soccer kit I wore for years (and days) straight as a 9-year-old. The next year carried the same thrill: the small island nation I was representing, although in the middle of the Pacific, was home to a star winter olympian. Both my junior and senior years shared the same three qualifications for forging alliances with other countries: 1. They weren’t threatening to wage nuclear war. 2. The delegates were cute boys. 3. The nations were home to my favorite soccer teams.
“The Beautiful Game” (whatever that game may be) is the great connector while also threatening to fracture us into factions.
It's no surprise that a stadium would brim with impassioned spectators trying to convince the “other” — the other team, the other fan, the other player — that their team (and political party) should win. Sport holds the kind of steadfast belief that makes the Pope ride in a Ferrari, a cathedral chisel a soccer team’s emblem onto its walls and a fan light a Saint Leclerc candle. It’s also the kind of blind allegiance that makes an arena the perfect place for political tribalism.
The politics of F1 take up most of my brain power these days. Yes, the politics of who was at fault on Sunday — a Red Bull or a McLaren — but also the political ties the sport will never shake because they are necessary for its survival.
When one driver stands among the British masses on Sunday, the nation will have crowned another victor earlier that week, 55 miles south of the circuit. And, who knows, maybe the new prime minister will stop the quickest competitor for a photo-op.
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