NYON/LJUBLJANA: Aleksander Ceferin has shed his usually carefully-guarded personal opinions by stepping out of UEFA diplomatic parameters by attacking political correctness in the western world and denouncing the absence of freedom of speech.

Ceferin, president of the European football federation, put his head above the political parapet In a interview with the Delo newspaper in his native Slovenia.

He said: “We are all fed up with political correctness. Here in the Western world, freedom of speech no longer exists. You can no longer say what you think. On one hand, there are the right-wing populists who have a simple rhetoric — migrants are taking your jobs and engaging in crime, LGBT propaganda will make families non-existent, they will destroy your children, and so on. This is such simplistic populist rhetoric that anyone can understand it.

“On the other hand, almost all Western mainstream politics (it is neither left- nor right-wing) and most of the mainstream media are addressing people from the intellectual and arrogant high ground.

“They don’t tell people to talk about it, to think that nothing will destroy their families, that migrants do indeed commit crimes, too, but they are punished like everyone else … Nobody talks to the people, nobody explains to them that people can love each other regardless of their sexual orientation, nobody explains to them that some people are uncomfortable in their own bodies.

“This mainstream is saying: ‘Don’t you dare discuss this or argue with us.’ No one can say what they think anymore, except stand-up comedians. Mainstream politics should ask itself what it is doing wrong to make all this happen. You cannot say to people to not talk about it anymore.”

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