How do we do it then?
In the regional policy declaration (from the Dolimont government, Editor’s note), there is talk of the role that the provinces can play in the supracommunality. Why not ? Another method: mergers between municipalities. It would be more compact. If we were French, the problem would be solved: we would have a metropolis like Lille.
Willy Demeyer (PS), mayor of Liège: “If Liège were French, it would already have four to five tram lines”
In any case, Frédéric Daerden seemed open. While waiting for more, could we have a merger between Liège and Herstal, which still has 41,000 inhabitants?
There is a large urban continuum between Liège and Herstal. You move from one municipality to another without realizing it. Herstal is one of the municipalities that is most closely aligned with Liège. We had discussions with Frédéric Daerden on this model, as with other mayors. But the creation of a metropolis will not be enough to resolve the problems of Liège, which is penniless. The first thing to do is to balance our budgets and our accounts. We need to reduce the sail significantly. This will make Liège more desirable for municipalities likely to join it.
What is the attitude of the Walloon government in all this?
The bottom line is that Wallonia has a problem with the centrality (of cities), it does not finance it well. Unlike Flanders. In Flanders, structures have been greatly simplified at many levels. The city of Antwerp got out of debt, it’s true. But Antwerp is also very well endowed by the Flemish Municipal Fund. Liège and Charleroi together have 24% of the Walloon Municipalities Fund while Antwerp and Ghent have 40% of the Flemish Municipalities Fund. In Wallonia, there is a lack of understanding between the territories: the cities do not put themselves in the place of the countryside and the countryside does not put themselves in the place of the cities.
gullIn Wallonia, there is a misunderstanding between the territories: the cities do not put themselves in the place of the countryside and the countryside does not put themselves in the place of the cities.”
The slow decline of the Liège political elite: “We live with a bomb under the table”
-How do you see the city’s financial future? The Region had to lend money to Liège, Mons and Charleroi as part of its Oxygène plan because banks refused to lend money to the big Walloon cities…
We are working with the Region to build solutions together. We will make substantial efforts in the future and we have already achieved a lot. At one time the city had 8,000 or 9,000 officers. Today, we are at 2,800. In municipal history, we have intercommunalized certain services, we have sold buildings… Balancing the city’s accounts in one year is not possible. But we will be able to follow a trajectory that will bring us to balance.
The little history of the Town Hall of Liège: a “Violette” bloomed again after the ravages of Charles the Bold and Louis XIV
Coming back to the idea of creating a metropolis, current questions demonstrate that the Belgian institutional system is not ideal. No ?
For the metropolises, the regionalization of the State, as it was carried out, was an error. A model based on the provinces would have been better. The provinces correspond in each case to a living area. From this point of view, the territory of the provinces is structured around major cities. Regionalization has not made it possible to meet this reality. And we are still there today… Furthermore, there remains in the Code of Local Democracy a reference to the law dating back to the 1970s which provides for the possibility of creating federations of municipalities and agglomerations of municipalities around the five major Belgian cities. This constitutes a legal basis for metropolises.
Should we have organized federalism around the ten provinces as federated entities rather than the Regions and Communities?
We could have organized the system around five Walloon provinces and five Flemish provinces, with a regional institution lightFor example. I’m not proposing anything, we’re not going to go back… But if we want to think carefully, as I said, the provinces correspond to the living areas. The debate will be imposed on us: we will be forced to simplify structures, to make economies of scale in the future.
Willy Demeyer (PS): “The idea that the PS was the party of those on welfare has percolated, even if it is false and unfair”
