The mayor grew up in a constructing so decrepit — filthy hallways, no personal bogs, no showers — that his buddies in close by concrete towers pitied him.
5 a long time later, that constructing — in St.-Ouen, a Paris suburb — is a distant reminiscence, and as a replacement rises France’s Olympic satisfaction: the athletes’ village, with its architectural-showcase buildings which are outfitted with photo voltaic panels, deep-sinking pipes for cooling and heating, and sleek balconies from which to look down on the forest planted beneath. One-quarter will turn into public housing after the Video games.
“Swiftly, now we have the identical feeling of satisfaction as folks dwelling within the hypercenter,” stated the mayor of St.-Ouen, Karim Bouamrane, 51, utilizing his private shorthand for the glamorous downtown playgrounds of the elites. “There was Los Angeles, Barcelona, Beijing, London, Sydney and, now, there may be St.-Ouen.”
Even earlier than the Olympic Committee select to take a position on this economically depressed northern suburb, St.-Ouen was altering. However since then, and since Mr. Bouamrane’s election as mayor in 2020, the transformation appears turbocharged.
Dump vehicles rumble all through the small metropolis, together with in entrance of the 160-year-old Metropolis Corridor, the place jackhammers and excavators claw on the pavement, following plans to inexperienced the adjoining plaza with timber and benches.
On the heart of the exercise is Mr. Bouamrane, a member of the Socialist Celebration, who’s within the information loads today as St.-Ouen prepares to welcome the Olympic athletes.
He’s asserting contracts with universities and faculties, signing partnerships with international governments and bringing the American ambassador into a neighborhood elementary faculty to satisfy college students, who scream and wave in pleasure throughout their arrival.
“Shallowness, self-confidence,” Mr. Bouamrane stated. “That’s what’s children are getting by way of the Olympics.”
The center baby of an illiterate Moroccan immigrant who got here to Paris to work on development websites to help his siblings again house, Mr. Bouamrane is conscious about the ability his picture presents on classroom visits. However inspiration just isn’t sufficient — he’s channeling the worldwide highlight of the Olympic Video games to lure new packages, infrastructure and alternatives into his metropolis, so children, he stated, can “turn into the architects, and never the passive victims, of their lives.”
“I’m utilizing the Olympic Video games as a political weapon, in a noble method, to boost consciousness and empower an entire era,” stated Mr. Bouamrane, sitting beside Tony Estanguet, the top of the Paris Olympic Committee, at a current lunch.
Interviewing Mr. Bouamrane feels a bit like racing by way of a enjoyable home after devouring two cones of cotton sweet. He begins tales in English, switches to French, abruptly launches into an impassioned Portuguese — the most recent language he’s studying, his fifth. He peppers his breathless paragraphs with citations from Marx, Plato, Sartre, Spike Lee and Pink Floyd. He breaks into the refrain of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” after which, with out warning, begins singing “It’s a Query of Time,” by Depeche Mode.
Within the warmth of all his speaking, he takes off the jacket of the blue three-piece go well with he wears like a uniform, together with the beaded bracelets his daughter made him. He kilos one phrase repeatedly as he speaks: equality.
“He was born with character and confidence,” confided one in all his childhood buddies, Ahcen Goulmane, an actor.
Mr. Bouamrane enters his workplace at metropolis corridor, pointing to myriad framed pictures and posters crowding the partitions. There’s Tommie Smith atop the 1968 Olympic podium in Mexico Metropolis elevating up his gloved fist, and Sócrates, the Brazilian physician and star soccer participant who opposed the army dictatorship.
“He used soccer like a weapon, with the identical philosophy behind it — equality,” stated Mr. Bouamrane, who was the host of a big celebration final month to call a road within the Olympic Village after Sócrates, a stone’s throw from the place the mayor’s dilapidated childhood house as soon as sat. Sócrates turned one in all his inspirations again then and has caught with him ever since.
“I put that photograph first on the wall first day once I was mayor,” Mr. Bouamrane stated. By likelihood, the Brazilian Olympic delegation came over and noticed the photograph. A connection was made, and shortly not solely was St.-Ouen the host village for the Brazilian staff and followers throughout this summer time’s Video games, however Mr. Bouamrane additionally signed a twin-city settlement with Rio de Janeiro.
He has signed a flurry of different partnerships, together with one to ship younger local weather activists from St.-Ouen to Belém, Brazil, for subsequent yr’s COP30 convention on local weather change.
One of many industrial suburbs constructed on the sting of the town to feed the nation’s development, St.-Ouen had factories that started to shut within the Seventies, abandoning poverty, unemployment and crime. If Parisians ventured there, it was normally for the sprawling flea market that was began by rag pickers chased out of Paris within the 1870s.
Rising up, Mr. Bouamrane and his good friend Mr. Goulmane have been a part of a good circle, all kids of immigrant laborers, who spent their Saturdays collectively within the library, devouring traditional books, newspapers, movies and music. They’ve remained shut.
“One factor that Karim taught us is that nobody will decide our futures. It is going to be us,” stated Madjid Aggar, 51, one other member of their group, who’s now an elementary schoolteacher. “To get there, you want tradition and a base. That’s why he was at all times a great pupil. It was essential for us — not simply to succeed academically however to know the world.”
All of them expressed a way of exclusion that got here from dwelling on the least glamorous facet of the periphérique — the ring freeway that encircles Paris, just like the medieval partitions that protected the elegant palaces, flowering gardens and prestigious universities. As a substitute of direct racism, they felt a obscure social ostracism, they stated, and with it, low societal expectations.
Correcting that sense is on the core of Mr. Bouamrane’s political program, which he calls “democratizing excellence.”
“Right this moment in France, individuals who can evolve and select their life are within the hypercenters,” stated Mr. Bouamrane, who’s married with three kids. “You’ve gotten the perfect colleges, the perfect lecturers, the perfect hospitals, the perfect connections. For those who don’t, you should work 10 occasions as onerous, and justify your self on a regular basis.”
After graduating from college with a grasp’s diploma in economics and European regulation, Mr. Bouamrane landed a administration job in a cybersecurity firm simply because the web was taking off. The career supplied years of journey, significantly to america, the place he practiced his English and broadened his worldview, deepening his love for the beneficiant French social safety system. It was additionally, he stated, “the primary nation the place I felt revered for my qualities.”
Across the similar time in 1995, he was first elected to the native council of St.-Ouen. Later, he joined the Socialist Celebration, and he would finally turn into its spokesman.
Since changing into mayor, Mr. Bouamrane has lured corporations, together with Tesla, to open places of work in St.-Ouen, which, by way of the extra taxes paid, have helped finance new elementary colleges.
A couple of French faculties have been persuaded to open campuses right here, together with the revered enterprise faculty Audencia, with particular enrollment packages for native residents. The French American basketball famous person Tony Parker has come on board, agreeing to open an elite sports activities faculty in an deserted sports activities complicated that’s within the midst of a 14 million euro renovation ($15 million) for the Video games. It was a social dinner with Mr. Bouamrane that clinched the deal, he stated.
“I had a ‘coup de coeur’ — love at first sight — for his imaginative and prescient, his ardour and what he needs to perform in his metropolis,” stated Mr. Parker, a former San Antonio Spurs level guard.
Mr. Bouamrane’s power and imaginative and prescient has additionally caught the eye of the nation’s Socialist energy brokers like Matthieu Pigasse.
“I would like him to be the way forward for the French left, the social democrats,” stated Mr. Pigasse, an funding banker as soon as nicknamed the “Che Guevara of finance.”
Mr. Bouamrane doesn’t cover his nationwide ambitions. He considers it a duty to struggle in opposition to the rising power of far-right concepts and politics in his nation.
However, for the second, he’s centered on native folks, who lean into his automotive window to congratulate him on the modifications they see.
“That is the France we have to construct collectively,” he stated.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.