© EuroFootball.com
French national team and Barcelona defender Lilian Thuram attacked conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday, accusing him of racism and promoting dangerous divisions in the country.
L. Thuram often spoke out against racism, and caused a huge uproar last year by inviting homeless immigrants to international matches.
"Sarkozy's rhetoric is not supposedly racism, it is the truest racism," the French national team defender said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper "El Mundo."
"He wants to create a ministry of immigration and national identity, which is dangerous... When you start dividing people and categorizing them into groups: one type, Muslims another, black people another - you teach people to see them as different," Thuram shared his opinion on Sarkozy's policies.
N. Sarkozy defended his plans for a ministry to protect France's traditional values, stating that France has a huge integration problem.
"Who needs to be integrated? My mother is French, my father is French. Why should I need to be integrated? Just because I'm black," the Frenchman pondered aloud.
"France does not have problems with immigration, it's problems related to citizenship. Some French people don't think that another French person is French. If I were to finish playing football in the morning and return to France, people wouldn't want to see me as French, they would see me as an immigrant," Thuram argued.
Conservative N. Sarkozy focused his campaign on immigration, security, and issues of national identity, which traditionally align with the ideas of the far-right National Front. He will compete against one of the main candidates, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, in the first round of voting on April 22.
The two main candidates will meet in a runoff election on May 6 if neither is elected with a majority of votes in the first round.
