It was written. In this city which wanted to abolish its police before beging it to come back, where the Palestinian flags sometimes float higher than the star banner, Minneapolis has just crossed a new course. In the Cedar-Rivery district-that its inhabitants have baptized “Little Mogadishu”-one exults: one of theirs has just triumph. Omar Fateh, son of Somali refugees, a practicing socialist and Muslim senator, crushed the Democrat primary for the municipal election, relegating to the door the current mayor, Jacob Frey, perceived as a moderate within what is still called, in Minnesota, the Democrat-Paysan-Ouvrier party. After New York, with the designation of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim of Indian and Ugandan origin, this breakthrough of an identity and pro-Palestinian left in another great American metropolis is however not a surprise.
Each time, the DSA (the Democratic Socialists of America) is at the maneuver, methodically targeting cities where minorities are organized enough to weigh in the Democratic primaries. But this radical and communitarian wing of the Democratic Party may well, a little over a year of midterms, prove to be a gift for the Republicans.
Unless improbable reversal, Fateh should therefore be elected mayor of this city in the Midwest next November. A culmination for this 35 -year -old young man, with a knife blade face and a beard carved like Professor Tournesol, who had, from 2020, jostled the old local democratic party, by beating an outgoing state senator. Already, at the time, he landed as a champion of tenants against the promoters, minorities against the police, Muslims against Islamophobia.
Formerly a showcase of a Lutheran and tolerant America, Minneapolis has become the bright symbol of this demographic tilting. “Mill City” – nickname inherited from its former minoteries – has not waited for Fateh to illustrate as a laboratory of the new left. Long land of welcoming Scandinavians progressive (Minnesota is also the only state to have not voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984), the city radicalized after the death of George Floyd, in May 2020, killed here. Riots, calls to “Define” The police and outbreak of violence transformed his image of Eden Social Democrat into an urban nightmare. Since the mid -2010 mid -years, homicides have jumped 110 %. Minneapolis even inherited a new nickname: “Murderapolis”.
The Somali community has acquired a decisive electoral weight
In this context of migratory chaos, the Somali community – nearly 50,000 people, or around 10 % of the Minneapolis population according to the American Community Survey – has acquired a decisive electoral weight. Fleeing civil war in the 1990s, then jihadist chaos in the 2000s, these migrants rebuilt their lives in the HLM towers of Cedar-Riverside, a district that is also nicknamed “West Bank” (like the West Bank) because it borders the Mississippi. During Ramadan, calls for prayer rejoice here by speaker. Difficult to imagine that after the war, we still talked about Norwegian there. The installation of Somalians was most often carried out with the help of social programs and Islamic associations. The city already has a member famous for its anti -Zionist positions and its anti -Semitic rhetoric. Ilhan Omar, “star” of the identity left, American born in Mogadishu, elected to the congress since 2018, never leaves his hijab and has taken an oath on the Koran.
A burden for their camp
In Omar Fateh meetings, we meet young veiled women brandishing signs “Justice for Palestine”Uber drivers, halal grocery workers: in short, the ecosystem of the 14th American agglomeration (with its neighbor Saint-Paul). Fateh has made it a strength, especially vis-à-vis its detractors. And arises as a victim. In the state Senate, he already said that “The terrorism of white supremacists was the main threat of the country”.
Here he is now vilishing the media reminiscent of his record as elected to the local congress: prayer times granted to Muslim employees of Amazon, or the opening of his office during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, while the city already had two dead, 60 seriously injured and 1,500 damaged or destroyed buildings. The right the caricature in pirate of the film Captain Phillipsembodied by the American actor of Somali origin Barkhad Abdi, which he actually resembles. An outrage for the Democrats, who only tolerate mockery against Trump!
In a country where Democrats are struggling to seduce beyond their urban bastions, these new figures of diversity may well become both a burden for their camp and a boon for the Republicans. On Fox News, just hours after the ballot, a commentator quipped: “Minneapolis chooses a Somali and Socialist mayor. Let them continue: America looks. »» With an almost identical program (end of illegal expulsions, rent freezing, police disarmament), Fateh and Mamdani are likely to transform their cities into caricatures of socialism and Islamism, and to rob the immense white suburbs of Swing States During the 2026 midterms. To the point of becoming, in spite of themselves, the best electoral agents of Donald Trump.
