Meet the Muslim mayor who wants to be France’s next president
Karim Bouamrane says six years governing Saint-Ouen have convinced him that France’s political class has mistaken social problems for identity issues
Karim Bouamrane announced his bid to become France’s next president the way he does most things: on his own terms and ahead of schedule. Speaking on France Inter radio on 9 June, the Socialist mayor of Saint-Ouen said he planned to unite France’s divided left ahead of the 2027 election with La France Humaine et Forte, the political movement he launched in 2024 with former president François Hollande and centre-left politician Raphaël Glucksmann.
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It is an ambitious bid from a politician who, until recently, was little known outside the Paris suburb he has governed since 2020.
“I will do everything I can to make sure I’m on the ballot — and that I win,” he said when announcing his candidacy. Speaking to Hyphen, he rejects what the French call a candidature de témoignage — a symbolic campaign — and says he intends to reach the second round of the presidential election.
Bouamrane believes the 2022 presidential election changed French politics. Candidates from both the Socialist Party and the centre-right Republicans won less than 5% of the vote in the first round, shattering the political order that had dominated France for decades. He believes this result opened the way for candidates like himself whose careers were built outside the national political establishment.
Born in 1973 to Moroccan immigrant parents, he joined the Communist Party aged 22 and the Socialists at 41 — the same year he ran for mayor of Saint-Ouen and lost. He ran again in 2020 and won, then was re-elected comfortably in March.
Six years governing one of France’s most diverse municipalities, he says, has convinced him that the country’s political class is asking the wrong questions. “The first person who gets questioned is the mayor,” he tells Hyphen. “You see the people every day. You build a contract of trust.”
While national politicians focus on immigration, Islam and national identity, Bouamrane says the people he meets are more concerned about housing, schools, public services and security.
Bouamrane argues that France’s political class has mistaken social problems for identity ones. Racism and Islamophobia are real, he says, but they worsen deeper problems of housing, public services and inequality rather than explaining them. “The problem is social, exacerbated by the ethnic and the religious,” he says.
Housing is the example he returns to most often.
“France is missing half a million homes, and most candidates leave the subject alone, because they consider it local rather than presidential,” he says. That figure is his own estimate, but the pressure behind it is real: 2.885 million households were on France’s active social housing waiting list at the end of 2025, up 4% year-on-year. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a neighbouring local authority to Saint-Ouen, the main social landlord puts it plainly: nine applicants for every available home.
Hafida, who manages a holiday letting company near the mayor’s office, is among those looking for a flat in Saint-Ouen. New social housing, she says, “hasn’t kept up” with demand partly, she explains, because residents in unsanitary buildings need rehousing before new units become available to others.
Housing also exposes the limits of Bouamrane’s argument. Residents acknowledge improvements to the town, but six years into his mayorality, demand for affordable housing continues to outstrip supply.
Bouamrane argues that Paris has reduced the banlieues to debates about immigration, Islam and security. He points to President Emmanuel Macron’s October 2020 speech in Les Mureaux, where the president warned of a religious “counter-society”, paving the way for the loi séparatisme, a law adopted by parliament in July 2021 that tightened state oversight of religious organisations and associations.
On a summer evening, as families gather in a World Cup fan zone by the docks to watch the exceptional — and remarkably multicultural — French team play, Saint-Ouen tells a different story: one of Muslims integrated into everyday French civic life rather than living apart from it. Teenagers queue at food stalls, while Lime bikes lie scattered outside a town hall that has invested heavily in cycling infrastructure and redevelopment.
Residents give mixed answers when asked about Bouamrane himself. Kamel Moumni, who commutes from Créteil to work for RATP, the Paris public transport authority, recalled seeing him chatting to crowds at the town’s Fête de la Musique. “He’s a good guy,” says Clotaire, who has known him since before he became mayor. Others are less convinced. Ayman, who works at L’Égyptien and has lived in Saint-Ouen for five years, shrugged: “No, never seen him.”
Opinions become more concrete when the conversation turns to the town itself. Residents point to speed bumps, new parking, replanted gardens and streets cleaned daily. Clotaire, a 60 year-old, long-term resident, describes him as hardworking and good with local children. Hafida credits him with new housing, the Paris 2024 Olympics athletes’ village, partly built in Saint-Ouen, a transformed waterfront and a major investment in security, with CCTV now a visible feature across the town — an emphasis she says is unusual for a leftwing mayor.
On Islamophobia, Bouamrane argues that for many: “Islam has become synonymous with Islamism, immigration and insecurity.”
It’s a position supported by data. France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, which publishes an annual survey of attitudes towards racism and discrimination, has repeatedly found that hostility towards Muslims is closely linked to hostility towards immigrants more broadly, echoing his argument that Islam is often treated as a proxy for wider anxieties about immigration and security.
In November 2025, four Muslim representative bodies filed a legal complaint over an Ifop survey they said conflated ordinary Muslim religious practice with extremism.
Bouamrane also rejects the idea of a single “Muslim vote”. By his estimate, 90% of Muslims in France simply work, pay taxes and want good schools for their children. “Muslim voters are spread across the political spectrum, just like anyone else,” he says, dismissing the notion as a fantasme — a myth.
He argues that class often shapes people’s experiences before ethnicity does. “Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, the president of PSG — he has no problem. He’s rich, he’s in the establishment,” he says. “A friend I grew up with, there were places he couldn’t get into, banks that wouldn’t lend him money.”
Yet he also argues that race and religion matter when people seek power. French elites, still overwhelmingly white, carry what he calls the vestiges of colonialism — a habit of reducing non-white public figures to their identity in a way white politicians rarely experience. The label “Muslim politician”, he argues, is part of that reflex. “Nobody calls Macron a Catholic politician, do they?”
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To make the point, he describes himself: “I am French, my parents are Moroccan, I am Franco-Moroccan. I am Muslim.”
Before entering politics, Bouamrane worked in cybersecurity, where he says he encountered the same double standards he now criticises: expected to be compliant, but labelled arrogant the moment he showed ambition. He believes politics works much the same way. Being Black, Muslim, Arab or Maghrebi, he argues, “doesn’t cause trouble” until “you have ambition to govern at the highest level”.
Bouamrane asks to be judged on his record and his ideas for France. But his own story suggests that the closer he comes to national power, the harder he will have to fight to be seen as a politician rather than a Muslim, a French Moroccan or a former communist.
As Bouamrane prepares his presidential campaign, Hafida is still waiting for somewhere to live in Saint-Ouen, her application stuck somewhere in the queue. “It’s always pending,” she says.
