At age 42, Mehdy Belabbas embodied the French republican promise of upward social mobility: the son of a Muslim construction worker of Algerian descent, he was the first in his family to attend graduate school and served for 12 years as the deputy mayor of the working-class city where he grew up.
And yet for the past two weeks, Mr Belabbas has been thinking about just one thing: “I’m wondering if I should leave France.”
Mr Belabbas’s thoughts stemmed from days of heated, if not hostile, public debate, largely fuelled by President Emmanuel Macron’s own ministers, that started in…
