Le Pays De France - Son of a refugee, Belgium's migration minister is no 'token Ali'

"It's not the easiest, nor the most fun job," Mahdi told AFP in his minister's office in Brussels.

"Issuing orders to leave the territory, telling someone 'you came but you can't stay' is not the nicest message. But it is necessary," added the 33-year-old centrist.

The zero-tolerance message has thrust Mahdi into the limelight in this linguistically divided country, and drawn abuse from his opponents on social media.

Before taking the top job, Mahdi was little known outside Dutch-speaking Flanders, where he first made a name for himself as the leader of his party's youth group after an appearance on a game show with his dog Pamuk.

From there he made his way up the party ranks of the CD&V as a Belgian of Arabic origins who didn't shy from delivering a harsh message to non-white youths who broke the law.

"Dear little scum, We've had enough," he wrote in November 2017 after a night of rioting in the centre of Brussels following a World Cup qualifier match between Morocco and the Ivory Coast.

The blunt affront to the groups of mainly north African origin made him few friends in Brussels' gritty neighbourhoods, but it propelled him in Flanders, home to nationalist parties with a harsh line on migration.

In 2019, while a city official in Vilvoorde, he ran as a surprise candidate for party president and only narrowly lost, giving him the political heft to seek a federal ministerial job, taking over from a nationalist provocateur, Theo Francken.

The first wave of controversy came last summer, when Mahdi was criticised for his uncompromising handling of a hunger strike by undocumented migrants, which angered the left and rocked the seven-party coalition in power.

In January, Mahdi again found himself the subject of vitriol after announcing the expulsion of a Moroccan imam who was accused of "extremism" and "interference" in Belgium.

The imam, Mohamed Toujgani, had been a figure in the Moroccan community for 40 years and until 2021 officiated in one of the country's largest places of worship, the Al-Khalil mosque in the Brussels commune of Molenbeek.

Although he later regretted his remarks and apologised, the imam had called on followers to "burn the Zionists" in 2009, against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But Mahdi said he based his expulsion decision on an intelligence report describing him as a radical preacher who posed a danger to national security.

- 'Traitor' -

To some, the measure seemed arbitrary. Toujgani, who is in Morocco and de facto prevented from returning to his family in Belgium had never even been questioned, his lawyer said.

After the news, Mahdi was denounced by some as a "traitor" to his community, in reference to his Arab-Muslim origins.

Stung, Mahdi again took up his pen to write of his roots "that go all the way back to Baghdad" and the education he received from his father, who fled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in the late 1970s.

"He always taught me not to judge a man on the basis of his religion or his skin colour but on the basis of his actions," Mahdi wrote, declaring himself opposed to any form of "communitarianism".

His father, he told AFP, even refused to teach him Arabic, which he does not speak. He was educated in Dutch, his mother's language.

Mahdi is especially critical of what he sees as clientelism of politicians who close a blind eye to what happens in migrant communities in return for votes, a tempting strategy in a country where voting is obligatory.

He says this form of political patronage is practised by "almost all parties" and has been an obstacle to integration by enabling a blind withdrawal into identity politics in immigrant communities.

Today, he says, "many people of immigrant origin are fed up with being treated like an easy-to-collect ballot" and no longer want a "token Ali" to represent them.

Whatever the case, "I am not the token Ali", he said.

"The only community I want to represent is the Belgian community and all its inhabitants in their diversity. A magnificent diversity when it is based on a shared cultural background."

(Y.Rousseau--LPdF)