Municipal Elections 2026: The Political Victory of Neighborhood Culture
There will be a before and an after these municipal elections in 2026. A major and striking feature of this electoral sequence is the rise to the highest local responsibilities of many political figures from immigration and the suburbs, to use the expression chosen by the MIB when it was created thirty years ago.
Clearly, the popular territories have been the center of political mobilizations that have surprised even their most astute observers. It is not easy to make an exhaustive list – given the differences in profiles and contexts, we will come back to this – but we can already cite an impressive list of mayors from the “cities of France”, newly elected or re-elected: Bally Bagayoko (Saint-Denis), Sonia Benameur (Ris-Orangis), Karim Bouamrane (Saint-Ouen), Idir Boumertit (Vénissieux), Aly Diouara (La Courneuve), Mohamed Gnabaly (L’Île-Saint-Denis), Adama Gaye (Mantes-la-Jolie), Sofienne Karroumi (Aubervilliers), Samira Ketfi (Corbeil-Essonnes), Bassi Konaté (Sarcelles), Abdelkader Lahmar (Vaulx-en-Velin), Yahaya Soukouna (Fleury-Mérogis), Demba Traoré (Le Blanc-Mesnil), Azzédine Taïbi (Stains), Omar Yaqoob (Creil), Mélissa Youssouf (Villepinte).
The cases mentioned present a great diversity of situations, and there is still much to analyze, without idealization or essentialization, with a real perspective on the political evolution of these territories. These phenomena do not come from nowhere. Understanding them means revisiting the history of popular mobilizations that have taken place there since the 1980s and especially the contrasting emergence of citizen lists claiming their roots in the neighborhoods and having long projected the latter into electoral competition.
These successive successes create surprise, yet they were predictable. For several years, every national or local election has revealed the electoral weight of the popular neighborhoods and the interest of their inhabitants in participating in the political process.
