Neither an oversight nor a clumsiness. For those in the field, the message is clear. By not having a minister or secretary of state responsible for the city, Michel Barnier's government is sending a strong signal. In terms of public policy, working-class neighborhoods and their 5.4 million inhabitants mainly boil down to a history of buildings. This is evidenced by the title of the position of Valérie Létard, Minister of Housing and Urban Renewal, who inherits the city portfolio under a decree of attribution published on October 10, three weeks after the announcement of the composition of the new government.
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This is also evidenced by the budgetary choices which the new minister inherits and which she must assume. Thus, the amount of the envelope allocated to urban policy – program 147 – should, this year, be reduced by 90 million euros, or a drop of 14%, and thus going from 639.5 million euros to 549.5 million euros. Not to mention the cuts in common law budgets, such as that of national education, “whose popular communes, in great suffering, will undoubtedly feel the effects more severely”worries Gilles Leproust, mayor (Communist Party) of Allonnes (Sarthe) and president of the Association of City and Suburbs Mayors.
At the same time, the funds allocated to the National Agency for Urban Renewal should be amended and increased during the next parliamentary debates. “We are returning to a concept supported by the right which consists of thinking about the issues linked to working-class neighborhoods only from urban planning and security angles, and of brushing aside the social aspect of this policy, comments sociologist Thomas Kirszbaum, associate researcher at the Center for Administrative, Political and Social Studies and Research, in Lille. Except that with more than twenty years of hindsight, we now know that this is not enough. Obviously, the absence of a city ministry responds to a demand from the right and the extreme right, who think that too much has been done for the neighborhoods by suggesting that the State has poured money into them. billion, which is totally false! »
Policy of “gradual disengagement”
Many elected officials and associations working in popular communities see this as a desire by the government to relegate these areas in difficulty to the bottom of its priorities. They also denounce a “unhealthy competition” with the rural world, which has a minister delegated to the minister of partnership with the territories and decentralization, responsible for rurality, commerce and crafts. “But they will not succeed in dividing us, I am very happy for them”underlines Damien Allouch, mayor (Socialist Party) of Epinay-sous-Sénart (Essonne). And to add: “The fact that the word “city” is not mentioned in the minister’s title is a humiliation, it is the negation of our unique problems, the negation of all the work that we have carried out in recent years. Here, things are clear, the government no longer even pretends to be interested in the subject. »
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