23/01/2014
Eduardo Inclán is Maître en Histoire by the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail
On 14 January, President François Hollande declared his intention to launch in the coming months a project to reform France's territorial administration, particularly with regard to the 22 regions and 101 departments into which the country is divided. This project that has gone unnoticed by the press due to the lack of a text which can be analysed deeply and the juicy budgetary reforms simultaneously presented.
The general intention of the reform was to eliminate the capacity 'millefeuilles' into which the coexistence of different administrative levels has turned: the town Hall (Hôtel de Ville), the canton, the department, the 'agglomeration' communities of cities over 450,000 inhabitants, the region and the central government, through the departments' prefectures. These authorities, although they have marked capacities have, from the 80s on, tended to encroach on the powers of others, that is, they have generated administrative duplicities. And always with the same speech: the best care to the population, growing steadily and without the involvement of ministries, beyond them being able to increase or reduce transfers and economic subsidies, which in 2010 reached record levels of 11,000 million euros for town hall and commune spending and over 7,000 million euros for the regions.
A few days after, and given the clamour of the regional offices held by the Socialist Party, the Budget Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, detailed some measures to be included in the project, such as controlling the debt of the French town halls (currently over 173,700 million euros), the intention to merge some small regions, which would fall from 22 to 15, encouraging the voluntary merger of departments, through the mechanism of giving more subsidies to the new departments and reducing the budget of those reluctant to change. And, above all, reducing the current 600,000 elected officials of the territorial administration, which cost a total of 1,170 million annually in salaries and allowances.
But many of these measures are already well known to the French. The French Government has tried to limit the uncontrolled growth of the regions since 2007. First it was Edouard Balladur's Administration which proposed merging regions under 4 million people, removing the cantons and those elected in each department becoming the representatives of citizens in regional parliaments, abolishing regional elections, among other major reforms. This project failed due to the political situation at that time: the French Central Government was right-wing (UMP) while most of the regions were in socialist hands. After the following regional elections in 2010, the Fillon Administration decided to revisit the issue of the reform of the Administration, which was indeed accomplished in the fields of, for instance, Justice. However, the French Socialists turned this reform into a battlefield to wear down President Sarkozy and the reform fell into oblivion when the Right lost its majority in the Senate, but the problem was still alive and thriving.
With Hollande's arrival to the Elysée Palace it seemed these reforms were no longer necessary because the new government seemed to support the idea of a "big government", interventionist and with great spending power. But the fall in tax revenues during 2013 and the pressure of the national debt are forcing the abandonment of these principles to increase spending, to begin instead with a tough period of budget cuts, thus the issue of land reform has been retaken. So far, there are no new guiding principles in this area, but rather the attempt to make some fusion of the above proposals which can be accepted by the socialist regional public officials who hold the key to this process. The Ayrault Administration is forced to save in all departments and the Socialist Party will have to make a great internal and external job to make their bases accept this State reduction project, which they have always opposed firmly in the streets when the proponent was conservative. And meanwhile, the rest of leftist forces and civil servants' unions make haste to accuse the socialists of traitors.
In summary, to begin with, and until we see the final text of the proposal, it seems unlikely that Hollande and his advisers will have a closed reform plan, but will propose measures to reduce the administration case by case, and as long as they can be started without much social opposition, using persuasion and the National Budget to convince the regional elected officials that the cost of the State has to be reduced, while the ministries do the same, with the aim of reducing the huge annual deficit of all the public administrations between 2014 and 2016. It is a great challenge for a president and a prime minister in their lowest political and social hours, but France needs someone to take the helm to cease wandering aimlessly in economic and political matters. We'll see if his own party allows this after analysing the results of the local and European elections in the spring of 2014.