I earned my stripes in the youth movement and at university, where I had some run-ins with the administration. I joined Jean-Luc Mélenchon right before the 2012 presidential campaign. I was active for several years while continuing my studies; I didn’t necessarily want to become an elected official right away. Following my studies I worked for four years for Éric Coquerel, who’s now president of the Finance Commission [in the National Assembly]. After that, I started to get some media buzz because I went on TV shows, I did interviews, etc. Then in 2022, it all came together during the parliamentary elections when comrades in Roubaix were searching for somebody to represent their struggles.

As an MP I’ve focused a lot on local issues. There’s always this tension for MPs, who say, “We’re representatives for the nation, not necessarily for a particular constituency,” and also that we don’t have the tools to resolve local issues like housing, etc. So, we should focus where we can do something, that is to say, on the law.

I don’t exactly agree with that. I’ve seen that locally an MP’s mandate includes the power to bring people in for official questioning. So, it’s not true to say that there’s nothing we can do. This thinking led me to handle a lot of cases directly. On the Left, we often criticize the state — and deservedly so. But sometimes town hall is the problem. What we can do as a local government, and what often doesn’t get done, which upsets the people who live there, has real consequences for people’s lives.

Roubaix was one of the richest cities in France because it was home to the entire national textile industry. The only real competition came from Britain. We had La Redoute [an enormous fabric manufacturer based in Roubaix, which also distributed through a popular, comprehensive catalog]. Roubaix was a city marked by intense class struggle. There was always this paradox: a very rich city, where the ruling class was raised and were physically present, but the workers were poor and mistreated.

When I say the ruling class, I mean that [luxury brand LVHM chief] Bernard Arnault’s family came from there. Gérard Mulliez’s family [which owns huge businesses like Auchan, Leroy Merlin, and Décathlon] came from there. Arnault went to middle school in Roubaix.

The ruling class financed lot of big projects. It was a little more preoccupied than it is today with the question of labor reproduction.

All this expanded the city. There were spaces for culture, spaces built for hygiene — La Piscine de Roubaix, which is an incredibly beautiful museum, known around France, was initially built [as swimming baths] so that the workers would have a space to wash. Roubaix has these conflicts but also, in some places, a democratic culture that accompanied the development of its proletariat.

What changed the game was the fact that the factories left. They were outsourced. Before, even if there was poverty, there was work, and the ruling class was present. Now, the ruling class has left. There’s still one bourgeois neighborhood, Barbieux. But it’s different now: there are not so many of the big bosses or captains of industry.

The city is profoundly marked by the entire history of the workers’ movement, and its industrial development. And it’s kept that identity.

I myself grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis [north of Paris]. When we’re in Saint-Denis, we feel like we’re in the Parisian suburbs, even though the city has its own identity, too. But in Roubaix, ruling-class influence took on a more important dimension. Roubaix was never a suburb of Lille. Now, people sometimes say that Lille has become the dynamic city. But go back eighty years and Roubaix was the focus, not Lille.

In Roubaix, the situation’s a little unique. Even though it’s lost local tax revenue, it still receives financing from VAT revenue. Unlike other cities, under the latest budget Roubaix doesn’t lose the credits it receives. Because Roubaix is the poorest city in France, the state continues to finance it.

About 50 percent of the city’s operating budget comes from the state. So, Roubaix isn’t one of the cities being strangled by the state withdrawing financing. But it is bearing the brunt of the weakening of public services in general, such as the public hospital system. Our hospitals have big problems, especially where mental health is concerned. Many people are suffering from mental pathologies in our psychiatric hospitals, because poverty produces that, too. At Hôpital [Lucien] Bonnafé, for the children’s mental health section there are eight doctor positions open and zero doctors onsite. In the adult psychiatric section, I think that out of six positions, there’s only one doctor left.

Many national problems are also represented [in Roubaix]. For example, one middle school principal told me when I visited that “we’re missing speech therapists in the city.” A child who might have a problem with stuttering or dyslexia isn’t tested for it and then has problems with learning and reading. That creates frustration, exclusion, and delays in learning.

Today we don’t know what a big France Insoumise–run city looks like. Faches-Thumesnil has around 20,000 people, but there isn’t a political model there, beyond there being a mayor who does his job well (and did quite well in leading the city during COVID).

I’m interested in developing a political vision. On the Left, and in our young movement France Insoumise, we’ve focused a lot on the conquest of national power. That’s not a bad thing, because national power is the heart of the struggle. But I think that we need to reactivate people’s political imagination and inspire them at the municipal level. In the historical tradition of the Left, it’s always been a space for new possibilities and a political vision.

What would an Insoumise city look like? In part, that’s the work that we’re taking up with my steering committee and the campaign. I think some neglected themes really need addressing.

For example, the question of urban form. Peri-urban residential suburbs, where there’s nothing but one house after another, don’t foster any sort of community life at all. Instead, everybody goes in their own car, to their own home, to watch television. These are the type of spaces where the vote for [Marine Le Pen’s far-right] Rassemblement National has grown.

There’s another sort of urban space that is currently collapsing in France, namely the kind of shopping centers that developed during the 1970s. Today they’re struggling, with the rising cost of energy, and so they’ll need reinventing, because this model is falling apart. As well as taking care of poverty, taking care of the security problems that arise in a working-class city, and keeping Roubaix clean — a political organization and its militants need to use their imagination on these issues too.

Of course there are the problems of security, cleanliness, and poverty, but it can’t stop there.

To give you an example, we spoke recently with the director of a company whose ambition is to recreate town squares, a sort of central focus in every neighborhood. That can be a policy objective. We know that people will go to an area to do their shopping, and it’s there that we can put our social services, where we can meet and encounter people. Creating these kind of exchanges is also part of the fight against poverty and segregation.

No. The municipal government is involved in the decisions, but the national police are controlled by the state. The mayor has some influence over the police, of course.

I prefer to talk about “safety” rather than “security,” which is something broader.

When it comes to the national police, we don’t have a hand on the wheel of the state’s security policy, which has been catastrophic. It’s been a policy focused on drug trafficking. That’s all well and good, but its focus on statistics hasn’t been effective.

There are problems a local government can resolve, like broken doors that haven’t been repaired in ten years. That’s one thing I want to do: take care of doors and elevators that haven’t been repaired in months, or even years, because the local representatives haven’t been doing their jobs or using their power to intervene with the social-housing bodies to do the necessary repairs.

I found myself having to request the replacement of an elevator, where on the fifth or sixth floor you had an elderly person who wasn’t able to leave her house for months. That type of thing is also the job of politicians: to sometimes lean on the social-housing bodies. So, there are questions of public order that are linked to this, questions of security that go beyond just fighting organized crime.

I see a lot of things in terms of security, or what I call safety. When you live in unsanitary housing and you have children, your children aren’t living in security. Like you said with the mold: they’ll develop asthma, they’ll develop respiratory illnesses. It’s the same for food security. One of the main illnesses in my city is diabetes, because people eat too much sugar. So, my line is that security isn’t only about the likelihood that you might get assaulted. And while Roubaix may have a certain reputation, in reality it isn’t the city in France with the most insecurity, statistically speaking.

The true lever that a town hall has is the municipal police. Today France Insoumise is more focused on getting rid of the municipal police and reverting to a national force, but I’m still a little uncertain, to be honest. I question a little the idea of whether we should truly have just a national police and not municipal police forces as well, while recognizing all the risks that are there, such as unequal treatment, etc. It’s not a simple debate for me, whether to give more weight to the national police or something else.

But after that, when it comes to security, we have plans for now that are very concrete. For example, I don’t think that it’s the job of the national police to solve all the world’s problems. But at the moment at the département level there’s a big conflict. There are lots of posts being cut in what we call “prevention.” That includes street mediators who do social work, who work alongside young people, in particular those who are the most troubled. These jobs are being cut in my constituency, in my city.

Typically, spending money on prevention can be more effective than spending more money on police. That’s because somebody who’s working in prevention can work during different hours and fulfill different tasks. They can support young people who are sometimes a little lost by helping them find work, helping them reintegrate into society, and getting them involved in athletic or cultural activities, which at the end of the day will have a more significant impact on security than just having a policeman monitor them.

For me, the question of security can’t solely be addressed from a policing perspective. While the Right has often criticized mediators, I think they’re often more socially effective in terms of security than just increasing the amount of police in a neighborhood, because social mediators are aware when a young person is starting to go off the rails. Often they can prevent a young person from making the leap to actions and ending up in bad circles, whether that means drugs or prostitution.

No, there’s no deep state in Roubaix. When it comes to the mayor, I’m not coordinating my campaign based on a judicial process that has to take place. For me, the battle is a political one, and our differences should be settled politically. As for the corruption in question, it concerns an act of fraud that doesn’t involve a very significant amount of money. It’s more that they acted completely incompetently. [Laughing] They were bad at cheating. But we’re not talking about sums that would indicate there’s a deep machine there. In any case, for the moment. Based on what we know now.

There is often clientelism in working-class towns because people don’t have a lot of money. In some places they accept jobs, or ask for jobs, in exchange for votes. That’s a classic arrangement in all cities, and there’s that in Roubaix, too. But among the thousands of municipal personnel, this concerns only a small minority.

I think the biggest problem for the municipal workforce today is a lack of political leadership and coordination, and a lack of working side by side with elected representatives, more than it being a problem of corruption or clientelism. There are also many municipal employees on health-related leave, and that has less to do with any sort of clientelism and more to do with bad working conditions.

I think that the Left’s strength in the past was its ability to open up horizons and its political imagination, locally and not only at the central-state level. Local government can offer a demonstration that change is possible. We can show that we can improve people’s daily lives and be inventive. The North, with its strong working-class tradition, was the region where many social policies first originated, which were then disseminated at the national level. Low-income housing is a notable example. Many social polices come from the département-level governments, not the state.

Today there are new questions. I’m thinking of nutrition. We have a concrete problem, the explosion of illnesses like diabetes, which are linked to bad nutrition. Handling this problem at the municipal level is also a demonstration of what we can do nationwide. These are things we still need to think through. But promoting the local production of certain types of products, whether that’s through local farmers or serving food in school cafeterias; these are all things which municipal politics can address.

For example, the city is responsible for elementary schools. Middle schools are run by the département, and high schools by the region. But for the youngest students, it’s the local government that can orient their experience.