The mayor grew up in a constructing so decrepit — filthy hallways, no personal bogs, no showers — that his associates in close by concrete towers pitied him.
5 many years later, that constructing — in St.-Ouen, a Paris suburb — is a distant reminiscence, and as an alternative rises France’s Olympic delight: the athletes’ village, with its architectural-showcase buildings which can be 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 develop into public housing after the Video games.
“Hastily, we have now the identical feeling of delight as individuals dwelling within the hypercenter,” mentioned 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’s St.-Ouen.”
Even earlier than the Olympic Committee select to speculate 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 vans 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 bushes and benches.
On the heart of the exercise is Mr. Bouamrane, a member of the Socialist Occasion, who’s within the information rather a lot lately as St.-Ouen prepares to welcome the Olympic athletes.
He’s saying contracts with universities and schools, signing partnerships with overseas governments and bringing the American ambassador into an area elementary faculty to satisfy college students, who scream and wave in pleasure throughout their arrival.
“Shallowness, self-confidence,” Mr. Bouamrane mentioned. “That’s what’s youngsters are getting by way of the Olympics.”
The center youngster of an illiterate Moroccan immigrant who got here to Paris to work on building websites to help his siblings again house, Mr. Bouamrane is aware of the facility his picture presents on classroom visits. However inspiration isn’t sufficient — he’s channeling the worldwide highlight of the Olympic Video games to lure new applications, infrastructure and alternatives into his metropolis, so youngsters, he mentioned, can “develop 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 approach, to lift consciousness and empower an entire era,” mentioned 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, instantly launches into an impassioned Portuguese — the newest 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 swimsuit 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 considered one of his childhood associates, 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 navy dictatorship.
“He used soccer like a weapon, with the identical philosophy behind it — equality,” mentioned Mr. Bouamrane, who was the host of a big celebration final month to call a avenue 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 considered one of his inspirations again then and has caught with him ever since.
“I put that picture first on the wall first day after I was mayor,” Mr. Bouamrane mentioned. By likelihood, the Brazilian Olympic delegation came over and noticed the picture. 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 12 months’s COP30 convention on local weather change.
One of many industrial suburbs constructed on the sting of the town to feed the nation’s progress, St.-Ouen had factories that started to shut within the Nineteen 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 basic books, newspapers, movies and music. They’ve remained shut.
“One factor that Karim taught us is that nobody will decide our futures. It will likely be us,” mentioned 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 all the time an excellent scholar. It was vital for us — not simply to succeed academically however to grasp 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 imprecise social ostracism, they mentioned, and with it, low societal expectations.
Correcting that sense is on the core of Mr. Bouamrane’s political program, which he calls “democratizing excellence.”
“At the moment in France, individuals who can evolve and select their life are within the hypercenters,” mentioned Mr. Bouamrane, who’s married with three kids. “You have got the perfect colleges, the perfect lecturers, the perfect hospitals, the perfect connections. When you don’t, it is advisable to work 10 instances as laborious, and justify your self on a regular basis.”
After graduating from college with a grasp’s diploma in economics and European legislation, Mr. Bouamrane landed a administration job in a cybersecurity firm simply because the web was taking off. The career supplied years of journey, notably 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 mentioned, “the primary nation the place I felt revered for my qualities.”
Across the identical time in 1995, he was first elected to the native council of St.-Ouen. Later, he joined the Socialist Occasion, and he would ultimately develop into its spokesman.
Since turning into mayor, Mr. Bouamrane has lured corporations, together with Tesla, to open workplaces in St.-Ouen, which, by way of the extra taxes paid, have helped finance new elementary colleges.
A number of French schools have been persuaded to open campuses right here, together with the revered enterprise faculty Audencia, with particular enrollment applications 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 advanced 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 mentioned.
“I had a ‘coup de coeur’ — love at first sight — for his imaginative and prescient, his ardour and what he desires to perform in his metropolis,” mentioned 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,” mentioned 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 battle towards the growing power of far-right concepts and politics in his nation.
However, for the second, he’s centered on native individuals, who lean into his automobile window to congratulate him on the modifications they see.
“That is the France we have to construct collectively,” he mentioned.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.
