French city caught between dreams of Mamdani and the taint of Muslim Brotherhood

Strasbourg’s Muslim candidates are under nationwide scrutiny before local elections

Cem Yoldas is far-left candidate at next year's municipal elections in Strasbourg. Sunniva Rose / The National

In a Turkish-style restaurant in Strasbourg sits a self-described far-left, anti-racist, feminist politician who wants to be France’s equivalent of New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Cem Yoldas is seeking election in March as mayor of Strasbourg, France’s eighth largest city, but his campaign is one of two covered by media as a Trojan horse for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Polls credit the 29-year-old youth educator with about five per cent of voting intentions, far behind heavyweight socialist politician Catherine Trautmann, 74, who leads in the polls ahead of the outgoing Green mayor.

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Interest in Strasbourg has been heightened by the fact that its relatively large Turkish community is influenced by Islamist movement Milli Gorus, which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. A report from the national government this year led to measures to clamp down on alleged French chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the disbanding of endowment funds and a new asset-freeze mechanism.

The unfinished Eyyub Sultan mosque on the outskirts of the city, purportedly the largest in Europe, is supported by the organisation. A secondary school and another mosque are overseen by Ditib, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, a Turkish state-run umbrella organisation that is also most active in neighbouring Germany.

Yet whether next year’s elections will truly result in an expansion of the Brotherhood’s influence is a hotly contested question as polarisation in France increases.

Eyyub Sultan mosque in the outskirts of Strasbourg has been under construction since 2017 and is expected to be the biggest in Europe. Sunniva Rose / The National

“As soon as people see my face and my first name, they start imagining things,” Mr Yoldas said, speaking over a lunch of Adana kebab. “People call me an Islamist, but they don’t understand the Middle East and Islam. It’s like those accusing Mamdani of being close to the Muslim Brotherhood, though his father is Indian Shiite Muslim and his mother is Hindu.”

Mr Yoldas describes himself as of “Alevi culture,” a Turkish religious minority influenced by Sufism, which he says shares with the left values of “humanity, equality and environmentalism”.

Strasbourg influence

Finding inspiration in the insurgent campaign of New York mayor-elect Mamdani means Mr Yoldas is ready to face controversy head on. Like Mr Mamdani, he has had to contend with accusations of militancy. These claims highlight his role as spokesman for the Young Guard, an anti-fascist group dissolved by the cabinet in June for acts of violence.

Mr Yoldas’s criticism of Strasbourg’s twinning with the Israeli city of Ramat Gan – which he wants replaced by the Kurdish majority city of Kobani in northern Syria – has “cast a shadow” over his candidacy, according to weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

It is a charge he rejects. “I’m not a violent person,” Mr Yoldas said. “If I meet someone who votes National Front (far-right) in a market, I’ll speak to them and try to convince them.”

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a role model for some candidates in France's next municipal election. AFP

Attempts at emulating Mr Mamdani’s multilingual outreach include campaign leaflets in French, Arabic, Turkish, and in the Strasbourg dialect. That, too, has created a backlash.

Far-right campaigner Damien Rieu reposted a picture of the pamphlet on X to his 313,700 followers with the caption: “Municipal elections in Strasbouristan.” The suffix -Stan appeared to be a derogatory reference to Muslim influence.

Marion Marechal Le Pen, a far-right MEP and political ally of Mr Rieu, filmed herself this month in a two-minute video outside the site of the Eyyub Sultan mosque. “You think I’m in Istanbul? Not at all,” she said “I’m in Alsace, in Strasbourg.”

Critics must accept the fact that France is multicultural and that people appreciate being talked to in a language they understand, said Mr Yoldas. “The owner of this restaurant is from Kobani. When I gave him the tract in French, he didn’t understand everything, but when I gave it to him in Arabic, it was much clearer to him,” he said.

Turks are the most important group of foreigners in Alsace at an estimated 50,000 people and can vote in Turkish presidential elections.

In 2023, Mr Yoldas voted for centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) in the hope that its coalition would defeat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was re-elected for a third term. His favourite Turkish politician is the jailed left-wing politician Selatin Demirtas.

Mr Erdogan gave a 2015 speech in front of 12,000 people in Strasbourg but the political impact appeared limited by the time of 2017 French parliamentary election. The Erdogan-inspired Equality and Justice political party collected less than one per cent of votes – 9,976 ballots out of a total of more than 23 million cast.

Alsace alone

Describing Milli Gorus as “used by Erdogan's government to maintain control over Turkish immigrant communities”, Ms Marechal Le Pen called on voters to stop politicians from the “left, centre and so-called right” that have “rolled out the red carpet for Islamic communities” from being elected in March. “Selling our country to Islamists is the worst kind of corruption,” she said. “Those guilty must be removed from all political functions.”

The Strasbourg Christmas market was the site of a terrorist attack in December 2018. AFP

Milli Gorus refused to sign a charter of principles structuring the practice of Islam in France and Strasbourg city hall walked away from talks to grant a €2.5 million ($3 million) subsidy – out of total cost of €32 million.

History means the region, Alsace-Moselle, holds exceptions to the principle of laicite, or state neutrality towards religion. The region frequently changed hands between France and Germany.

The Eyyub Sultan mosque remains unfinished, the tips of its two incomplete 36-metre-high minarets barely perceptible in the low grey winter skies. In an adjacent building, the local Mili Gorus chapter organises activities.

On the day The National visited, it hosted a market selling clothes, children’s toys and fresh produce to a largely Turkish-speaking clientele. In the main room, a sign that read “Milli Gorus, a leading institution in services” hung on the wall. Its president, Eyub Sahin, was unavailable for comment while colleagues declined a request for an interview.

In published videos, Mr Sahin rejected claims of “radicalism and separatism” or of “any link to a foreign state”.

The market, a major tourist attraction, took place amid heavy security as the terrorist threat remains high. In December 2018, five people were stabbed to death by a man who had pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Polls show the local National Front candidate at 11 per cent, behind France Unbowed (12 per cent), the right and the Greens (16 per cent each) and the Socialists (29 per cent).

‘Islamist infiltration’

A second municipal candidate is 20-year-old Fahad Raja Mohammad. Daily Le Figaro recently described the dual French Pakistani citizen as a “symbol of this alleged Islamist infiltration”.

The charge stems from his former role as head of the Strasbourg’s Muslim Students of France chapter, an organisation described in the recent Interior Ministry report as linked to Muslims of France, itself accused of ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Speaking by phone to The National, Mr Raja Mohammed rejected the label, saying that he did not know what the Muslim Brotherhood was before the interior ministry’s report was published. His association with a campaign for gender-segregated hours at the Strasbourg municipal baths, which include Roman-style thermal baths, spas and saunas, was highlighted by Le Figaro. “There’s a lot of racism and discrimination in these accusations,” he said.

He also rejected assertions by Le Figaro that Ditib-connected individuals support him, although such rumours reached The National. His polling is so low he does not feature in some published rankings.

Haoues Seniguer, a French expert on political Islam in France, assisted in the compilation of the 74-page Interior Ministry report but makes his own characterisation of what is termed “municipal Islam”.

The crossroads city of Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament, close to the border with Germany. The mosque, under construction since 2017, is being supported by Turkey. AFP

“An unspoken issue that runs through all of this is less the Muslim Brotherhood than the urban visibility of Islam,” said Mr Seniguer, professor of contemporary history of international relations at Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3. “It’s a civilisational challenge that is not yet fully accepted by all political actors, but it is accepted in the far right and the hard right.”

One of the authors of this summer's Interior Ministry report, prefect Pierre Courtade, has spoken of the impact of “insidious” behaviour in French elections. Speaking to a parliamentary commission of inquiry into links between political parties and organisations propagating Islamist ideology, Mr Courtade said in November: “The real risks arise when Muslim Brotherhood activists or political Islamists appear on candidate lists – often not on community-based lists – or when they act in a more insidious way within the mayor's immediate circle. We have identified some cases in our report.”

Turkish organisation Milli Gorus organises a market inside the Eyyub Sultan Mosque compound in Strasbourg. Sunniva Rose / The National

Mr Yoldas believes that the real issue is an identity crisis faced by many Muslims. “More people are adhering to a hard right discourse that it’s a problem that France’s identity is changing. It has changed a thousand times,” Mr Yoldas said, pointing the expulsion of Germans from Alsace in 1918 at the end of the First World War.

Meanwhile, asked for a key difference with Mr Mamdani, who went viral during his election campaign with humorous videos, Mr Yoldas is self-effacing. “I’m Alsacian,” Mr Yoldas said. “We’re known to be quite strait-laced.”