Anti-drug activist campaigns in French election despite threats, 2 brothers lost to gang violence

PARIS (AP) — Amine Kessaci has been targeted with death threats and lost two brothers to drug gang violence.

But that has not silenced the 22-year-old activist who's running on an anti-drug platform in next month's municipal elections in Marseille, the French port city long known as a hub for the drug trade.

“At 17, I buried my older brother, Brahim, who was found burned. Less than three months ago, I buried my younger brother, Mehdi, who had done nothing, who died just because he was my little brother,” Kessaci told The Associated Press.

“In the mourning I’m going through, the message I want to convey is that I will not be silent,” the son of Algerian immigrants said.

In November, thousands marched in Marseille, France's second-most populous city, to denounce drug trafficking following the killing of 20-year-old Mehdi Kessaci in a shooting authorities suspect was a hit by drug gangs to intimidate and punish his activist brother.

Kessaci, his brothers and three other siblings grew up in Frais Vallon, a sprawling housing project built in the 1960s to house Marseille's waves of North African immigrants. Some 6,000 people, many living in poverty, inhabit its 14 concrete apartment towers, which are controlled by drug gangs and are among the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in France.

Kessaci's 22-year-old brother, Brahim, was dealing drugs in Frais Vallon when he was killed in 2020, his body discovered in a burned-out car.

That year, when he was just 17, Amine Kessaci founded the non-profit group Conscience to support families affected by drug violence, which the group says on its website too often condemns young people in housing projects “to failure, prison or the grave.”

With cocaine trafficking at an all-time high in France, Kessaci, now a law student, said he wants to get involved in local politics to take on drug dealers. There were 110 drug-related homicides nationwide in 2024, according to the most recent statistics released by the Interior Ministry. An additional 341 people were wounded in drug-related crimes.

The government is particularly worried by the recruitment of minors into drug gangs, which lure them in because they receive lighter prison sentences than adults.

In 2024, a quarter of those imprisoned for murder or attempted murder were teenagers, including 16 minors. A year earlier, 19% of drug trafficking suspects were minors, some as young as 12 or 13. And in Marseille, a 14-year-old hired by gangsters killed a taxi driver in 2024, while another teenager was stabbed 50 times and then burned alive, the Interior Ministry said.

“Drug trafficking leaves a trail of grief and death,” said Kessaci, who is running on the list of Marseille's outgoing left-wing mayor, Benoît Payan, in the March 15 and March 22 vote.

Bulletproof jacket and heavy police protection

A report by the independent body that audits public funds in France says drug trafficking remains largely concentrated in just 10% of French municipalities, but that it is spreading rapidly — including into rural areas — raising concerns ahead of the March elections.

Even before his youngest brother's death, Kessaci was under police protection. He attended his brother’s November funeral wearing a bulletproof vest. Last week, he was forced to leave a campaign event supporting the Socialist candidate in the Aix-en-Provence municipal elections. On Tuesday, the anti-organized crime prosecutors office announced an investigation into a plot targeting Kessaci.

Kessaci has repeatedly said he won't be intimidated and will continue to campaign openly despite the threats.

“In France in 2026, in a state governed by the rule of law, you cannot prevent people from coming and going,” Kessaci told the AP. “I will be in the field because my commitment was born in the field, and the ideology, the idea, the causes I defend, they are in the field and they require presence.”

Kessaci is not new to politics.

Two years ago, when he was just 20 years old, he was a candidate for a coalition of left-leaning parties in national legislative elections, narrowly losing a National Assembly seat in the second round to the far-right candidate.

Unlike the far right, Kessaci champions a grass-roots approach focused on the communities the drug gangs prey on, including improving schools, public transportation and other services.

He wants to introduce locally based police forces into impoverished neighborhoods to work with communities to undermine the so-called “narcocracy” — the power drug traffickers wield to intimidate neighborhoods and draw young people into their networks with the lure of easy money in the drug trade.

“The ‘narcocracy’ is this power they have to influence our lives: to block entrances to housing projects, to control who can come and go, to instill a sense of terror,” Kessaci said. “This is where drug traffickers show a certain intelligence."

‘My only enemy is drug trafficking’

According to the European Union Drugs Agency, France is among the EU countries with the highest reported lifetime cocaine use.

While he acknowledges that a strong police response is necessary to fight drug traffickers, Kessaci also wants to transform low-income housing projects through education, job training, revitalizing local businesses and creating employment opportunities, especially for young people.

To improve communication between police officers and the local population, he proposes doubling the police force in Marseille to 1,600 officers, opening branches in every city district.

Kessaci also aims to enhance living conditions in housing projects by introducing green spaces and much-needed renovations.

His plans include things as simple as replacing mobile trash dumpsters with fixed bins. “This will allow us to restore recycling in neighborhoods and, more importantly, to remove equipment from drug dealers, since they use the bins to create blockades,” Kessaci said.

French authorities have dealt some blows to organized crime — homicides in Marseille fell from 49 in 2023 to 24 in 2024, and drug-dealing spots were halved from 160 to around 80 — yet Kessaci won't let up.

“In this election, in this campaign, in this political struggle, my only enemy is drug trafficking,” Kessaci said.