‘Dirty Arab’: As the French elect their mayors, Muslim candidates face unrestrained hatred
Toufik Khiar has lost count of the number of times he has gone to the police station in recent days to report the defacement and removal of his campaign posters for France’s municipal elections, where he came fourth in the first round on Sunday.
The 43-year-old former economics and management professor decided to run for mayor of Kremlin-Bicetre, a town on the southeastern outskirts of Paris, under the Green Party banner. He had been an opposition city councillor there since 2020.
For him, there is no doubt that those who perpetrated these acts of vandalism are far-right supporters "upset to see a person of colour participating in elections", he told Middle East Eye after filing a complaint last week.
It was at the end of February that Khiar suffered the first wave of racist attacks. A friend sent him a photo of one of his posters defaced with hateful graffiti that left no room for ambiguity: "Dirty Arab. Go back home."
Stunned, the former elected official of Algerian origin initially thought it was a joke, before realising the truth. He is shocked and angry.
“It was the ‘go back home’ that hurt me the most. Especially since I’m from Normandy [in northwestern France], I was born in Le Havre! So, for me, home is France,” he told MEE, deploring the unleashing of racist speech in the country.
“For months, some people have been spreading insinuations: allusions, conflation, accusations of bad faith. They sow doubt, point fingers, let suspicion linger. And then one day, posters are tagged,” Khiar said, adding that he had been called “Mr Kebab” by an elected official from the municipal majority in 2023.
In Rehon, a small town in Meurthe-et-Moselle, in eastern France, Aurore Katramiz, a candidate in the municipal elections on the incumbent mayor’s independent list, was also given a “go back home” warning. Not because of her skin colour or her name, but because of her Islamic headscarf.
‘All it takes is a North African-sounding name to be labelled an Islamist tasked with infiltrating French political power’
- Toufik Khiar, candidate for the municipal elections
The scale and violence of the hate messages she has received on social media have led her to file a complaint.
"I've had comments linking me to the Bataclan [attacks perpetrated by the Islamic State group in Paris in November 2015], the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran - all kinds of comments that have absolutely nothing to do with my wearing a headscarf," she told MEE.
Katramiz has also been called “anti-republican” because of her hijab, although French law allows elected officials to wear distinctive symbols, including religious ones, unlike civil servants.
She, too, blames the growing normalisation of racism and Islamophobia in the country.
In Marseille for instance, activists from the National Rally (RN), the far-right party led by former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, did not even have to hide to insult Hanifa Taguelmint, a candidate on the list of the incumbent left-wing mayor, Benoit Payan.
During a leaflet distribution session in a neighbourhood of the city on 7 March, the woman in her sixties was called a "dirty towelhead" by a group of five young men holding RN leaflets.
Forty years ago, this leading figure in the fight against discrimination joined the so-called “March of the Arabs”, an anti-racist demonstration initiated across France by young people of North African descent to demand their rights to equal citizenship.
However, “in 2026, this equality still doesn’t exist,” Samy Debah, a 54-year-old candidate in Garges-les-Gonesse, a town in the northern suburbs of Paris, told MEE. He ran on a left-wing list that garnered 22 percent of the vote in the first round.
Muslims seen as ‘foreign elements’
During the 2020 municipal elections, the former history and geography teacher nearly won the mayoralty.
He fell just under a hundred votes short of the incumbent centre-right mayor, Benoit Jimenez, whom he now suspects of having blocked him by mobilising voters from his own political family and the far right through slander spread in the media.
Right-wing newspapers have portrayed Debah as “a very controversial figure” for being a former preacher within the Tabligh, a pietistic Islamic movement advocating a strict religious practice, and for having links with French-speaking circles of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the world's largest political Islamic groups. Debah denies the allegations.
He is also criticised for participating in the creation of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which was dissolved in 2020.
“I was attacked twice, as a candidate but also as the founder of an organisation that fights against Islamophobia,” he told MEE.
Muslims, he said, are always viewed with suspicion in France.
“You can never get by with the right and the far right. You’re labelled a separatist when you develop a different religious practice, and accused of entryism when you express the desire to participate in the democratic process of elections,” Debah said.
“For them, Muslims are, in any case, foreign elements in France,” he added.
“Separatism” was addressed by a law in 2021 which, according to its drafters, aims to “provide answers to the rise of communalism and the growth of radical Islamist communalism”. The legislation was strongly criticised by human rights groups, which saw it as an infringement on freedom of religion and discriminatory against France’s estimated 5.7 million Muslims.
The concept of “entryism” - or the supposed gradual infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood in France - emerged later in a growing struggle against political Islam, promoted by right-wing and far-right circles.
In December, a parliamentary commission investigating alleged “links between representatives of political movements and organisations propagating Islamist ideology” published a report recommending “heightened vigilance” in view of the municipal elections.
The commission heard testimony from the interior minister, Laurent Nunez, who said that the likelihood of “entryism” of electoral lists was “quite high”.
Nicolas Dragon, a RN MP and member of the commission, told its members that there was a risk of seeing "one or two Muslims or others" on the municipal ballot who had a "hidden objective of introducing things linked to radical Islamism".
His remarks were denounced by the Human Rights League (LDH), which filed a complaint.
Last June, the prominent rights organisation also strongly criticised a report from the interior ministry that argued that the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to infiltrate French society. The LDH described the report as conspiratorial and Islamophobic.
Prevented from running
“All it takes is a North African-sounding name to be labelled an Islamist tasked with infiltrating French political power,” Khiar said, adding that due to the elections, he has refrained from any public expression of faith so as not to give ammunition to Islamophobes.
For example, during Ramadan, he had to decline all invitations to iftar meals.
“A simple photo of me at an [Islamic fast-breaking] meal would have served as evidence against me,” he told MEE.
Members of the Union of Muslim Democrats of France (UDMF), a party born in 2012 “from the observation that Muslims have become scapegoats for all the ills plaguing our society”, are also keeping a low profile.
The UDMF had set out to present candidate lists for the municipal elections in Nanterre and Venissieux, two cities near Paris and Lyon respectively with a large population of North African origin.
However, the prefecture has not validated any of the lists.
“This is the first time this has happened to us,” Naguib Azergui, UDMF founder and vice-president, told MEE.
His party had already participated in elections, notably the 2019 legislative and 2024 European polls. But things seem to have changed.
“We have never encountered such narrow-minded people within the administration. We clearly saw that there were instructions,” Azergui said.
He told MEE that the electoral list review committees questioned the validity of the candidates' registration forms, even summoning some of them to check their applications were not fictitious.
Ultimately, and despite the evidence presented, including the personal appearance of candidates at the commission's office, UMDF's lists were disqualified.
‘Before, it was immigrants, now it’s Muslims; the focus has shifted from racism to Islamophobia’
- Farid Omeir, Union of Muslim Democrats of France
"We naturally filed administrative appeals. But they were rejected. So, we chose to distribute some of our candidates onto other lists, whose platforms are similar to ours," Azergui said.
The UDMF chairman, Farid Omeir, who wanted to run in Venissieux, told MEE that the hostility towards Muslim candidates is based on a colonial mindset that denies populations from former colonies and their descendants the right to be part of the Republic.
“Before, it was immigrants, now it’s Muslims; the focus has shifted from racism to Islamophobia,” Omeir said.
Sometimes, such rejection takes violent forms. The current election campaign is no exception.
On 6 March in Strasbourg, Djamila Haddoun, the candidate of the left-wing party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, LFI), was assaulted, insulted and threatened with death by a man armed with a knife while she was putting up posters with her teenage children.
The public prosecutor's office has opened an investigation.
Another candidate, Lahouaria Addouche, still in the running for the second round of elections scheduled on Sunday, has also been targeted with death threats.
Addouche, LFI lead candidate in Lille, in northern France, is in a runoff against the incumbent Socialist mayor. But already, her detractors are mobilising.
"Where are the French?" one internet user asked on the candidate's Facebook page, calling on "pureblood" voters to vote against her.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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