France's first Black Muslim mayor of a major city is already facing a racist campaign Bally Bagayoko won the mayoral election in Saint-Denis last March with more than 50% of the vote in the first round - a historic result for a city of 115,000 people.
He is the first Black and Muslim mayor of a French city with a population exceeding 100,000. Within days, the attacks began.
Conservative media outlets published material calling him a "monkey." Fabricated quotes circulated online, falsely claiming he had described Saint-Denis as "a city of Black people" rather than a city of kings - a crude phonetic distortion in French, but one that spread widely. The incoming mayor's office now receives hate mail and anonymous phone calls daily.
Bagayoko, 52, the son of a family of Malian origin, is not surprised. "We expected it," he told El Pais. "The first accusation came from the outgoing mayor, who claimed we were backed by drug traffickers. Then came the racist emails, the threats."
Anonymous callers leave the phone off the hook and play Malian music - a reference, he believes, to his surname.
"They think I offend the Republic," he said. "I represent everything they detest. I don't fit into their model of power. That's why they call me a monkey, or say drug traffickers chose me. It's a neocolonial approach."
Saint-Denis sits in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest department in metropolitan France and the one with the highest proportion of immigrants - roughly one-third of the population. It is a majority-Muslim, majority-minority city, and it has long been treated in French political discourse as a problem to be managed rather than a constituency to be represented.
Bagayoko's election reflects what sociologist Olivier Roy calls a "gentrification of the Muslim middle class" - a generation that came of age during the banlieue riots of the early 2000s, went to university, entered professions, and has now begun to seek political representation.
"The new France is a concept that has nothing to do with ethnicity or the division of the Republic," Bagayoko said. "It's about recognising that a new generation constitutes France, and that it's different from what it was 30 years ago."
The reaction to Bagayoko's election, both the racist harassment and the outsized political attention, illustrates the anxieties his presence provokes in a country still struggling to reconcile its republican universalism with the lived reality of its diverse population.