Amine Kessaci, determine within the battle towards medication, joins Benoît Payan’s record to make Marseille a “showcase against drug trafficking” | EUROtoday

The environmentalist and anti-drug activist Amine Kessaci introduced, Monday January 26, that he was a candidate for the municipal elections in Marseille on the record of the outgoing left-wing mayor, Benoît Payan, wishing to make the second metropolis in France a “showcase in the fight against drug trafficking”. The official announcement was made in a symbolic location, the Après M, a former McDonald’s within the coronary heart of the disadvantaged areas of the North, which with the assistance of the municipality has turn into a “fast social food”.

“I have the guarantee of knowing that the mayor will carry my fight, that alongside him I will be able to carry the fight and ultimately make Marseille the national showcase for the fight against drug trafficking”defined the 22-year-old younger man in an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP) earlier than this officialization. “I must commit to the memory of my little brother Mehdi, my two brothers, Brahim too”added Amine Kessaci, who misplaced Brahim in 2020, concerned in trafficking, and in mid-November his little brother Mehdi, a attainable “crime of intimidation” supposed to achieve him and which traumatized town and past.

The Marseille Spring record has not but been detailed, however Amine Kessaci is becoming a member of a coalition starting from socialists to communists, together with environmentalists, beneath the management of the outgoing mayor and ex-socialist Benoît Payan, to whom he’s identified to be shut. The latter surrounded Amine and his mom through the gathering of greater than 6,000 folks a couple of days after the assassination of Mehdi, shot in broad daylight on November 13.

“Fear cannot win us”stated the elected official. And if having Amine Kessaci constitutes a pleasant political coup, there are sturdy safety points across the younger man, who can not “take a step without having four or five police officers” round him and should placed on a bulletproof vest at each public occasion.

“Show that drug trafficking is not inevitable”

After Mehdi’s assassination, he made a sequence of media interventions. Less than two months earlier than the municipal elections, in a metropolis the place the RN shows its ambitions and locations safety on the heart of its marketing campaign, it desires to embody a “fierce fight against drug trafficking”.

“I am an associative and political activist, so I see what is happening in my city and I cannot do nothing and just watch”continues the one who advocates a “global approach”. He desires the return of group policing, public providers, significantly when it comes to training, and transport, to “open up cities” northern districts of Marseille.

On Wednesday, from Paris, he introduced his intention to create, after the election, a nationwide affiliation of mayors of France dedicated to drug trafficking. A couple of days earlier, he was the shock visitor in Lyon on the first assembly of environmentalist Grégory Doucet, offering his help to the outgoing mayor working for re-election.

A younger neighborhood activist propelled onto the nationwide scene, Amine Kessaci is just not his first try at politics. In 2024, candidate of a united left within the legislative elections within the north of Marseille, he reached the second spherical earlier than being narrowly overwhelmed by the outgoing far-right MP, RN Gisèle Lelouis (50.93%).

In a e book with a premonitory title, revealed within the fall, Marseille wipes your tears (ed. The noise of the world), he set the scene of his childhood within the metropolis of Frais-Vallon, pampered by an Algerian mom in a household “modest but not ignorant”. A mom to whom he dedicates his dedication, for her and all these neighborhood moms who battle to guard their youngsters from medication, and whose braveness he usually salutes.

It is specifically to help these households that the affiliation he created, Conscience, intervenes in disadvantaged suburbs in France. “I said I wouldn’t shut up. It’s not just about talking but acting every day to show that drug trafficking is not inevitable”he insists.