Holding the Gavel: Nadège Abomangoli and the Defense of the Banlieues

On the evening of October 21, 2024, Nadège Abomangoli took the chair of France's National Assembly to open debate on the 2025 budget. Finance committee chair Éric Coquerel began by saying he was "very happy to speak under your auspices," and the chamber applauded. The moment carried weight beyond procedure: Abomangoli, a vice president of the Assembly and a deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, had become the first Black woman to preside over a sitting of the French parliament's lower house.

Two years later, she is using that standing for a harder task. After the October 23 shooting in Trappes and La Verrière, which killed a young man and wounded several others, including a 12-year-old girl, Abomangoli refused the comforting story that the gunman acted alone in every sense. "It is an act prepared by years of racist bludgeoning," she told franceinfo. "These speeches come from the far right … and are relayed and normalized by the media system, which offers them free airtime without contradiction."

From Brazzaville to the "93"

Abomangoli was born in Brazzaville, in the Republic of the Congo, on September 15, 1975, into a political family; her father was an official in the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy (UPADS). She grew up in Épinay-sur-Seine, in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department north of Paris known by its number, the "93." It is the youngest and one of the poorest departments in mainland France, home to large communities of African, Caribbean and North African descent, and a fixture of right-wing television as a symbol of everything the far right says has gone wrong with the country.

She studied communications at CELSA (Sorbonne University), earned a master's degree in history at Paris-Sorbonne, and completed a master's in media and public communication at Sciences Po. Her first activism came through SOS Racisme, the anti-racist organization born from the 1980s marches of young people of immigrant descent. For years she worked inside the public service, as an internal auditor and risk manager for the City of Paris and as a parliamentary aide in the Senate.

A Party Spokeswoman Who Changed Sides

Abomangoli joined the Socialist Party in 2006. She served on the Île-de-France regional council from 2010 to 2015, chairing its sports and recreation committee, and in 2015 she won a seat on the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental council for the Épinay-sur-Seine canton, becoming a vice president in charge of housing and public safety. Under party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis she was a national spokeswoman, publicly defending President François Hollande. Yet on one defining issue of those years she broke with her own government: she opposed the plan to strip French nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism, a measure many Black and Arab French citizens read as a warning that their belonging was conditional.

In 2019 she left the Socialists for La France insoumise. Elected deputy in 2022 under the NUPES left alliance, she was reelected in 2024, after Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assembly, as part of the New Popular Front that blocked the far right's bid for a majority.

Naming the Machinery Behind Trappes

Her response to Trappes draws on that history. Much of France's political class described the shooting as the act of a disturbed individual; the suspect was transferred to a psychiatric unit days after his arrest. Abomangoli insisted that a man's mental state does not explain where his targets come from. The words that lead to violence, she argued, are aired every day.

On October 27, Mediapart published Facebook Messenger conversations it says it authenticated between the suspect, Kevin T., and former friends. In them he declared his support for Marine Le Pen and his obsession with immigration. "I can't stand being invaded anymore and doing nothing about it," he wrote in 2022. L'Humanité and Swiss and Luxembourg outlets reported the same messages, which also included "Islam = submission" and "Marine is your friend."

The vocabulary matters. "Invasion" is the language of the "great replacement," the conspiracy theory that a white Christian France is being deliberately replaced by African and Muslim immigrants. It has moved from fringe pamphlets to prime-time talk shows and campaign speeches. Abomangoli's point is not that one party pulled a trigger. It is that a country which repeats such language nightly cannot act surprised when someone believes it.

Why Her Voice Carries

Abomangoli speaks from three places at once. As a historian by training, she knows that racist violence in France has a long record, from the colonial massacres in Algeria and Madagascar to the police killing of protesters in Paris on October 17, 1961. As a deputy for the 93, she represents the young people whom the same television channels describe as a threat, many of whom marched this month against school cuts and the Parcoursup admissions system. And as the first Black woman to chair the Assembly, she knows how rarely people who look like her are allowed to speak with institutional authority about race in a republic that officially refuses to count it.

That last point is the heart of the matter. France forbids most collection of statistics by race or ethnicity, in the name of a colorblind universalism. Critics like Abomangoli answer that the far right is not colorblind, and neither was the gunman. Refusing to name race does not erase racism; it leaves its victims without the words to prove it.

What Comes Next

The investigation, led by France's national anti-terrorism prosecutor, continues, and anti-racist groups have demanded that the attack be named as the racist terrorism it appears to be. With the 2027 presidential election approaching and the far right leading in many polls, Abomangoli's warning reaches past one town in the Yvelines. The question she is putting to France is whether it will hold the speakers accountable along with the shooter.