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Saint-Denis is just over 9km from the centre of Paris but is in the poorest department in all of metropolitan France, a region marked by unemployment, low incomes and social disadvantage. But Saint Denis’s town hall was the backdrop to memorably joyous celebrations on the evening of 15 March. A delirious crowd carried the new mayor shoulder high, chanting his name over and over. Bally Bagayoko who led a leftwing list uniting the radical left party, La France Insoumise (LFI), and the Communist party pulled off a remarkable feat, decisively winning the second biggest city in the Paris (Île-de-France) region in the first of two rounds. He was the only French mayoral candidate representing a population of more than 150,000 not to require a runoff contest.
For the first time, Saint-Denis, which is home to 130 nationalities, has a mayor who reflects its community – a child of the city and the son of Malian immigrants.
Bagayoko is not alone. Other municipalities on the outskirts of Paris – where a large share of the population is descended from postcolonial migrants – have also joyfully elected mayors of colour for the first time. In Seine-Saint-Denis, emblematic of the banlieues 13 mayors of colour out of 39 were elected under various political labels.
At a time when, nationally, the far right controls more towns and cities than ever before, the emergence of a new generation of politicians of colour should be hailed as a sign of a healthy democracy. Instead it seems to have resonated like a political earthquake in a France that still seems unable to make room for its citizens of colour.
And so the celebrations in Saint-Denis were short-lived. It did not take long for the unusual nature of this election to trigger a response in the media bordering on panic. From the moment his victory was declared, Bagayoko faced a backlash. He was accused on social media of saying in an election-night interview that he would make Saint-Denis a “city of Black people” (“ville des Noirs”), when he had in fact clearly said Saint-Denis was “la ville des rois”, a well-known reference to the Basilica of Saint-Denis as the historical burial site of most French monarchs.
But the false claim, initially pushed by the far right, quickly spread across mainstream media. Its apparent credibility rested on one thing alone: the colour of the new mayor’s skin, which fed the assumption that Bagayoko would be either unable or unwilling to govern his city for all.
Bagayoko is not a newcomer to politics – far from it – his career ticks every conventional box in democratic politics. An elected representative since 2001, the 52-year-old served as deputy mayor and vice-president of the departmental council, and was a senior executive in a public firm, the Paris region’s transport company, RATP. His trajectory is hardly untraditional.
But one white journalist directly confronted him with the suggestion that his campaign had received backing from drug dealers, and asked “whose hands” he was in.
The tone of the attacks then took a particularly vile turn when, on the rightwing news channel CNews, he was compared by a guest to a “primitive tribal chief” and to a monkey. The matter is being investigated by police, and CNews has denied racism.
But, despite the extremely serious nature of the insults directed at a representative of the Republic, the institutional response has fallen short. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, and the minister of the interior, Laurent Nuñez, condemned the attacks, but only after being challenged in the media and in the national assembly.
Usually quick to speak out, the president, Emmanuel Macron, merely had his entourage say that he “has always condemned all racist attacks, wherever they come from”, without specifying what he thought of these particular attacks.
Last Saturday , I joined a large crowd in Saint-Denis, responding to the new mayor’s call to rally against racism. We gathered symbolically between the basilica and the town hall. While galvanised by finding myself among tens of thousands of people of all generations, I was appalled that not a single member of the government attended. The minister in charge of discrimination, Aurore Bergé, offered an implausible justification for her absence. “It was not the role of the state” to be there, she said, even though the then-prime minister, the presidents of the senate and the national assembly and several government ministers led a march against antisemitism in November 2023.
Across the Paris suburbs, beyond Seine-Saint-Denis, many newly elected local representatives owe their victories less to party structures than to their own territorial and social roots, often through local networks in sports, youth work, and community organising.
Yet all of them have faced racist attacks. Instead of welcoming an unprecedented democratic surge marked by record turnout and scenes of popular jubilation – with some city halls unable to contain the crowds – media and political actors continue to treat these citizens as illegitimate voters. One interviewer, for instance, pressed Bagayoko to explain why some housing projects and council blocks in Saint-Denis had “overvoted”, as if a high turnout from these areas were a problem. Meanwhile, the elected officials themselves were cast as intruders, as though they had slipped in through the back door, despite enjoying an indisputable popular mandate. Four Black members of the national assembly, all members of LFI, received a letter suggesting that they belonged not in parliament, but in a zoo.
The new generation of leaders of colour has not emerged out of nowhere. Over many years, they have built projects that reflect their own trajectories and those of the communities they represent.
Moreover, they are working to improve districts that are among the poorest and youngest in the country. Turnout remains alarmingly low, and the needs of residents are vast.
These areas face other urgent challenges of under-representation. Of the 39 mayors elected in Seine-Saint-Denis, just four of them were women and just two were non-white. But the local elections have reignited a deep-seated civilisational anxiety in a country that still struggles to see itself as anything other than white.
The disproportionate scrutiny directed at Bagayoko reveals a deep racial panic: the fear of a France embodied by Black or Brown faces – and, more fundamentally, of the erosion of a white supremacy rooted in the country’s colonial history. The issue is not so much the presence of people of colour, as their access to positions of power. The descendants of colonised people are no longer confined to subordinate social positions – they now aspire to lead their country, France.
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Rokhaya Diallo is a writer, journalist, film director, activist and Guardian Europe columnist.
