by AMEL BOUBEKEUR
In France’s 2026 local elections, colonial-era racial anxieties were used to undermine political representation & frame wins as threats, writes Amel Boubekeur.
The 2026 municipal elections revealed something new in France. Candidates from immigrant backgrounds were no longer just symbols of republican inclusion. In a remarkable number of cities, they were winning.
Notably, Bally Bagayoko was elected as mayor in the commune of Saint-Denis – situated in the suburbs of Paris – in the first round. His supporters, celebrating at the town hall, chanted, “We are all the children of Gaza.” The following morning, a journalist asked Bagayoko on national TV whether Saint-Denis had elected a mayor or a Gaza proxy.
During the same programme, a fabricated quote about him calling the commune “the city of Black people” was also repeated. But Bagayoko had actually described it as “the city of kings and living people.”
A local electoral result had immediately been placed within a geopolitical context.
We’ve heard it all before
Indeed, the script was predictable. Muslim voters, we are told, have driven the Gaza genocide into local politics. Identity has replaced class. Communalism has entered the polling booth. Local democracy has been overshadowed by foreign conflict.
What this reading overlooks, of course, is the larger redeployment at play. Gaza did not simply enter municipal politics randomly. Over the past two years, a geopolitical conflict has increasingly acted as a local screening process that determines who can represent whom, on what terms, and at what cost.
For decades, the representation of France’s banlieues relied on delegation. Parties chose minority candidates, vetted them internally, and presented them as proof that the Republic could incorporate difference on its own terms. These areas could be governed because they were not expected to develop autonomous political voices. Their role was to be represented, not to redefine representation.
La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) disrupted that arrangement. Not because it stood outside electoral calculations, it did not, but because it created a channel through which working-class suburbs with large communities from immigrant backgrounds could express themselves and be heard, without relying solely on the old gatekeeping structures of traditional parties, municipal notables, and diversity brokers.
What unsettled the French political landscape in March was not only that candidates from immigrant backgrounds won, but also that they seemed less dependent on the traditional system of delegated representation.
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