The Euros Can’t Cover Up Europe and Germany’s Cracks

Spain, mercifully, have won the European Championship. The only team to consistently play high-quality, entertaining soccer throughout the tournament, they won every game they competed in — an unprecedented feat — and, in doing so, they overcame four World Cup-winning teams in Italy, Germany, France and England, not to mention the 2018 finalists Croatia. They fully deserved their win.

Their opponents in Sunday’s final, England, played a very different tournament. Their run was significantly easier than Spain’s, and, in the neutral opinion of this writer, who happens to be Irish, their victory on Sunday would have represented a stain upon the sport. England, with their perpetual sideways and backward passing, sucked the joy out of nearly every game they played, committed to a sort of anti-football against inferior opposition and progressed, ultimately, because of last-minute flashes of brilliance by their talented attacking players.

Assuming you managed to avoid most England and France games — the French, too, seemed intent on boring their opponents into submission — the rest of the tournament was satisfactorily drama-filled. We’ve seen an absurd number of own goals, one of which, scored by Turkey’s Samet Akaydin, was among the funniest I’ve ever seen. We’ve witnessed the strange psychodrama of a profoundly talented Portugal team sacrificing itself at the altar of a faded, 39-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo’s frightening ego. And we’ve enjoyed the tournament’s lowest ranked team, Georgia, defying expectations by beating said Portugal team and making it to the knockout stages.

The Euros, broadly speaking, were fun, but, as ever with international soccer tournaments, politics has reared its ugly head at every turn. The ethnic tensions between the Balkan nations have been on show, with groups of rival fans directing racist and violent chants at each other. The people of Georgia, while enjoying their team’s performances on the pitch, have, at the same time, been facing off against their own government, which is forcing through a bill critics say will stifle civil society and align their country with Russia.

Days before the Euros kicked off, the far right made massive gains in the European parliamentary elections. The consequences were felt immediately in France, when President Emmanuel Macron inexplicably called a snap parliamentary election at home. The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party looked certain to benefit from the president’s rash decision, but, through last-minute deal-making between centrist and leftist parliamentary candidates, the reality of a RN-led government was, for the time being, avoided.

Other nations competing at the Euros have already succumbed to authoritarian and anti-immigrant governments. The far right is in power, either as part of a coalition or with a majority, in Turkey, Hungary, Switzerland, Slovakia, Italy, Croatia and the Netherlands. The United Kingdom has just voted in a centrist Labour government, but the far-right Reform UK party also saw gains in the election.

War casts the darkest shadow over this year’s Euros. Ukraine, whose team was knocked out of the group stages on goal differential, continues to struggle against Russia’s illegal invasion, while another conflict between two UEFA members who didn’t compete in the competition, Armenia and Azerbaijan, recently ended after the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh was officially dissolved and absorbed into Azerbaijan, in the process displacing tens of thousands of Armenians. 

This is to say nothing yet of the ongoing war on Gaza, in which several European states are complicit.

Which brings us neatly to the Euros’ host. Germany performed better on the pitch than might have been expected, given the failures of recent years, but their relative footballing success this summer is hardly enough to distract from the many crises the nation faces.

Nearly three and a half decades after German unification, a significant East-West economic divide remains — and it’s been highlighted by the tournament. Ten German cities have hosted matches throughout the competition, but all but one — Leipzig’s Red Bull Arena — are located in the west.

Even here, in the wealthier western parts of the country, the decline of public services has been laid bare by the Euros. Visiting fans have found that, far from conforming to the national stereotype of unyielding efficiency, the German railway network is falling apart after years of chronic underinvestment. Overcrowded trains, delays, and cancellations have been par for the course, while, earlier in the year, a wave of industrial actions swept through the country.

The war in Ukraine has had a profound effect upon Germany. Its reliance on cheap Russian gas has been exposed, forcing it to turn to other European nations — most notably Norway — to meet its energy needs. It has committed huge sums in military aid to Ukraine, while, at the same time, increasing its own defense budget. Living standards at home have collapsed, with the economy shrinking and deindustrializing, while more than a million Ukrainian refugees have arrived seeking safety. The far right has fed off the situation.

About 18% of Germany’s population are migrants of one kind or another, a fact which is reflected in the make-up of the national soccer team. Many of the players come from migrant backgrounds, which has led the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to label the team as too “woke.”

While the AfD is, in many ways, ridiculous, the truth is that it poses a genuine threat to German society. Members of the party have sought to downplay the country’s Nazi history, have deployed Nazi language, and have reportedly met with neo-Nazi activists to discuss a “masterplan” of mass deportations, should they ever achieve power. One former AfD member of parliament, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, was arrested for her involvement in an alleged far-right coup attempt to overthrow the German government and install a monarchy.

Through all of this, the popularity of the AfD continues to rise.

The AfD is an extreme force of German politics, but, all the same, it has found some common ground with the mainstream. Despite the profound irony of a German far-right party supporting Israel, the AfD, diligently committed to its deep-seated Islamophobia, has called for an end to UN aid to Palestine. The government, while not being quite as uncouth in rhetoric as the AfD, has hardly shown itself to be any better in practice.

Germany has acted against the Palestinians at every opportunity since October 7. Arms exports to Israel have dramatically increased since the war broke out. When South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Germany intervened on Israel’s behalf. As citizens have peacefully protested the war at home, German police have violently broken up the gatherings. Any hint of support for the Palestinian cause is automatically shut down and labeled as “antisemitic.”

After the professional soccer player, Anwar El Ghazi, condemned “the killing of all innocent civilians in Palestine and Israel” on social media, German prosecutors accused him of “disturbing public peace by condoning criminal acts in conjunction with incitement to hatred.” His employer, the German club Mainz 05, terminated his contract shortly after that.

While El Ghazi had overstepped the mark within the view of the German establishment, the same could not be said for the owners of Borussia Dortmund, who, not long before this year’s Champions League final against Real Madrid, announced a new sponsorship deal with German defense company Rheinmetall, which, in addition to making a fortune since the start of the Ukraine war, has also reportedly supplied arms to Israel during its war on Gaza. Fan protests have done nothing to scupper the deal, which has been implicitly supported by Germany’s deputy chancellor, Robert Habeck.

Germany, for good reason, feels guilty about its Nazi past, but its uncritical support for Israel, as it commits war crimes against the people of Palestine, is unjustifiable. Not only is it now complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it is also failing to combat the very antisemitism it claims to abhor. The country has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents since October 7, a situation not likely to be resolved by the government’s vicious suppression of legitimate opposition to Israeli crimes.

People across Germany, and the wider continent within which it sits, were, on Sunday, glued to Spain’s late deserved victory over England. It was a decent final to top a decent tournament, but, now that it’s all said and done, Europe is still facing up to a series of profound and frightening challenges. A good game, entertaining as it may have been, can’t change that.