{"id":4495,"date":"2026-06-26T20:12:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T20:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/?p=4495"},"modified":"2026-06-26T20:12:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T20:12:21","slug":"wilders-waves-the-red-card-at-moroccans-when-hatred-becomes-a-permanent-election-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wilders-waves-the-red-card-at-moroccans-when-hatred-becomes-a-permanent-election-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilders Waves the Red Card at Moroccans\u2026 When Hatred Becomes a Permanent Election Strategy."},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Wilders Turns the Morocco\u2013Netherlands World Cup Clash into an Electoral Platform\u2026 Has Football Become the New Battleground for Anti-Moroccan Rhetoric?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The announcement of the Round of 16 World Cup encounter between Morocco and the Netherlands should have been celebrated as one of the tournament&#8217;s most compelling football spectacles. Instead, in the Netherlands, the fixture was rapidly transformed into a political opportunity. Far-right leader Geert Wilders once again chose to exploit the occasion to revive his long-standing anti-Moroccan rhetoric, demonstrating that, in today&#8217;s populist politics, football is no longer merely a sport\u2014it has become an effective instrument for electoral mobilization.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">While millions of supporters around the world looked forward to a historic football contest rich in sporting significance and emotion, Wilders shifted the conversation by publishing an artificial intelligence-generated image on X portraying himself as the referee showing a red card to a Moroccan player, accompanied by the Dutch phrase <em>&#8220;Komt goed&#8221;<\/em>\u2014&#8221;Everything will be fine.&#8221; Behind what may appear to be a provocative social media post lies a far deeper political message: the deliberate transformation of a global sporting event into a symbolic act of exclusion.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"nl\" dir=\"ltr\">Komt goed. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/9YUzeWsOkJ\">pic.twitter.com\/9YUzeWsOkJ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/geertwilderspvv\/status\/2070406979290345931?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 26, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">To dismiss this incident as just another online controversy would be to overlook its broader significance. It illustrates a growing pattern across parts of Europe, where every Moroccan sporting success, every display of the Moroccan flag, and every international competition involving Morocco quickly evolves into a debate about national identity, immigration, integration, and Islam, rather than about football itself.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The Moroccan community in the Netherlands has now been part of Dutch society for more than half a century. Generations of Moroccan-Dutch doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics, artists, and athletes contribute every day to the country&#8217;s economic growth and cultural diversity. Many were born in the Netherlands and know no other homeland. Yet populist discourse persistently refuses to acknowledge this reality, preferring instead to portray Moroccans primarily as an electoral issue rather than as equal citizens.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">That is precisely why the Morocco\u2013Netherlands match carries significance far beyond the football pitch. It resonates deeply with hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin, many of whom embrace both their Moroccan heritage and their Dutch nationality without seeing any contradiction between the two. Where these citizens perceive cultural richness, populist politics seeks to manufacture a conflict of loyalties, presenting dual identity as an inherent source of division.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">This strategy is far from new. Only days earlier, Wilders had sparked another controversy by sharing a photograph of Moroccan players prostrating in gratitude after scoring a goal, accompanying the image with remarks widely condemned as offensive toward Islam. His latest publication therefore represents not an isolated incident but part of a consistent political strategy in which every visible expression of Moroccan or Muslim identity is transformed into material for ideological confrontation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Since Morocco&#8217;s historic achievement at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the national team has come to symbolize far more than athletic excellence. For Moroccan communities across Europe, it represents dignity, recognition, resilience, and the possibility of belonging without abandoning one&#8217;s cultural roots. Every victory strengthens the belief that it is possible to remain proud of one&#8217;s heritage while fully participating in the civic life of the country in which one lives.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">It is precisely this symbolic dimension that appears to unsettle populist movements. The greater Morocco&#8217;s international visibility becomes, the more aggressively it is portrayed as a challenge to national identity. The real audience of these messages is not the Moroccan footballer on the field, but the Moroccan-Dutch citizen watching from the stands or from home. The underlying implication is unmistakable: regardless of professional success, social integration, or civic contribution, one&#8217;s origins can still be turned into a political target whenever electoral interests demand it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">From an electoral perspective, Wilders understands that immigration, Islam, and the Moroccan community have long served as central pillars of his political appeal. He therefore has little need for genuine crises to energize his supporters. A football match, a religious celebration, or even a symbolic photograph may be sufficient to reactivate a political narrative carefully cultivated over decades. Such episodes reveal a broader transformation in contemporary democratic politics, where manufactured cultural controversies increasingly overshadow substantive debates about economic performance, public services, education, healthcare, and social cohesion.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yet portraying Dutch society as uniformly receptive to such rhetoric would itself be misleading. Across the political spectrum, numerous public figures, journalists, academics, and ordinary citizens continue to reject the instrumentalization of sport for ideological purposes. Many insist that international football should remain a celebration of diversity and fair competition rather than a stage upon which political actors seek to deepen social divisions. Their reactions demonstrate that the struggle over identity is not only taking place between political parties but also within Dutch society itself.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">For the Moroccan community, however, the challenge extends well beyond responding to individual provocations. The more profound question is how to avoid allowing such provocations to define the public conversation. Every emotional overreaction risks reinforcing the very polarization on which populist movements thrive. By contrast, respect for democratic institutions, active civic participation, and the everyday demonstration of responsible citizenship constitute far more effective responses than confrontational rhetoric.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Ultimately, this episode raises a question that extends far beyond Morocco, the Netherlands, or even football itself. When a leading political figure chooses to use a World Cup match to target a segment of his own country&#8217;s population, the issue ceases to be about sport. Instead, it becomes a test of Europe&#8217;s democratic resilience and of its capacity to protect equal citizenship in the face of increasingly polarized identity politics.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In the end, the most important question is not whether Morocco or the Netherlands will emerge victorious on the football field. The deeper question is whether European democracies can preserve the principle of equal citizenship when political discourse increasingly portrays every success achieved by citizens of immigrant backgrounds as a cultural or political threat. For once politics begins waving a red card at an entire identity, the greatest defeat is not suffered by the team eliminated from the tournament, but by democracy itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wilders Turns the Morocco\u2013Netherlands World Cup Clash into an Electoral Platform\u2026 Has Football Become the New Battleground for Anti-Moroccan Rhetoric? The announcement of the Round of 16 World Cup encounter between Morocco and the Netherlands should have been celebrated as one of the tournament&#8217;s most compelling football spectacles. Instead, in the Netherlands, the fixture was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,43,42,41,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-africa","category-asia-americas","category-europe-russia","category-middle-east","category-the-maghreb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4497,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions\/4497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diplomatique.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}