One, in France, already President of the Republic, elected with a little more than 13,500 votes out of a little less than 64,000 registered; the other, in the United States, already at the White House in his head, elected “socialist” mayor of New York, who publicly asked Charles III to return to India the Koh-i-Noor diamond set in the British crown. The extreme left version of the mayors have the nerve to immediately make themselves kings with their victory.
In France, Bally Bagayoko, LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, is on all the stages: he explains why he in a way “decapitated Macron” by taking down his portrait – and refuses to put it back on the wall despite the prefect’s calls to order – which would correspond to the universalism seen in Saint-Denis. He also uses the expression all over the place “my territories” or the formula “the territories that are mine”. In New York, Maddanism – let’s call it that – wants to save humanity with taxes on the ultra-rich and luxury second homes, and explanations on the saving virtue of Islam, the state religion for the America of the future.
There is something annoying in this inflation of the ego, and not very reassuring: reacclimatization will come. It will not be dictated by a far-right opposition, which this type of so-called “socialist” and redemptive leadership sees everywhere, but by reality. We cannot overtax the super-rich in New York without them moving, as we understood this week with the revolt of the owners of luxury pied-à-terre. We will need the police, even if we are also elected by those who stonewall them, in Saint-Denis as elsewhere.
Identity fervor
Provided they were not overthrown by the military, as in Algeria or Egypt, the Islamists quickly showed, in different forms, that they knew how to fill the mosques… but not the plates, as we saw in Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. We know the rest: the fervor of identity, the discourse of rediscovered dignity, the hunt for the rich, then the wall of reality and finally the headlong rush into violence or electoral defeat. We are always dealing with the same promise of salvation through identity, transposed here into postcolonial language.
But what do they want, these mayor-presidents, deep down in their souls? Power, certainly, and it is enough of a reason. But also a revenge played out. It is almost electric in their looks, in their speeches: a revenge of the community, of the different, of the real or supposed excluded. A journalist noted it: a revenge of the postcolonized is hidden behind the epic of reparation. Their mythology, to these superman, is almost Fanonian: the colonized become the subject of history, charged with a mission of moral purification of the world.
Here is the mayor of New York who is busy demanding colonial reparations from Charles III, and the other, in Saint-Denis, who is instigating the trial of a universal racism of which he wants to be both the victim and the remediator. Skilled, both, they face a contrite Western society and other voices inhibited by colonial history or by the transatlantic slave trade, often conditioned to feel guilty or on the contrary to refuse this guilt, while not really believing in it or feeling very isolated in their own country.
Violence or rout
The corrosive effect on the Republic is obvious and regrettable. The language of community threat, of separatism, that which demands “territories” conquered in front of everyone, the recourse to blind resentments born from the pain of History or its income may be useful for a moment but do not last. The plate is not filled with role-playing games. The experience of Islamists in the Arab world has already given its bitter lesson: it ends in enterprises of violence or in rout, because magical thinking does not easily give up illusion.
Some, like the mayor of Saint-Denis, are already building their Fanonian theory of popular legitimacy against institutional legitimacy. As for Mamdani, he no longer says anything about Trump since the latter received him in his Oval Office, after having called him a “socialist fou” and of “Communist” : the son found the father he dreamed of, his hidden model.
The narrative arc of resentment is as old as time. In France, the presidents of the Republic appear very numerous: at certain peaks of social protest, there are millions of them. They often end up returning home at the end of the day. In the United States, Mamdani wants India’s diamond to shine a little brighter than it.
