The new commune is now the second most populous city in Île-de-France. The project, announced by surprise in 2023 without consulting the population, was approved by elected officials in the spring.
Farewell Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. The commune of Seine-Saint-Denis disappeared this Wednesday, January 1, merging with its neighbor of Saint-Denis to form a new commune bearing only the name of the latter. This merger, announced by surprise in 2023 and voted on last spring, makes Saint-Denis the second most populous city in Île-de-France, behind Paris and ahead of Boulogne-Billancourt.
The new municipality officially has 149,781 inhabitants, according to town hall services, which narrowly allows it to obtain an allocation reserved for merged municipalities totaling less than 150,000 inhabitants. Saint-Denis will thus receive 15 euros per inhabitant for three years, for a total of approximately 6.74 million euros. To mark this merger, mayors and elected officials of the socialist majority have planned a symbolic ribbon cutting on Wednesday, at a crossroads where the two panels still face each other displaying Saint-Denis on one side and Pierrefitte-sur-Seine on the other. .
The opposition denounces a political maneuver
Mayors Mathieu Hanotin (Saint-Denis) and Michel Fourcade (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine) surprised even uninformed elected officials with their merger decision announced in April 2023. This measure did not appear in their program during the municipal elections of 2020. The two socialist mayors had notably highlighted that by becoming more important, the new town would carry more weight at the national level for several arbitrations, notably financial.
The opposition, on the other hand, saw this merger project as a purely political maneuver to acquire “a reservoir of voices” socialists with a view to the next municipal elections in March 2026. An association, Stop Fusion Pierrefitte Saint-Denis, was created and tried to put an end to it, without success. This process is enabled by a 2010 law enriched by other texts.
The main targets are villages and small rural communities in a country which has long had more than 36,000 communities, with the risk of seeing some of them without governance due to a lack of candidates for elections, and sometimes at the cost of a poor public service. The merger is voted on in the municipal council then validated by the prefecture which verifies compliance with the procedure. It is not obligatory to consult the population. On May 31, 2024, during simultaneous municipal councils, the project for the new commune of Saint-Denis was voted on without difficulty: 45 votes for out of 55 in Saint-Denis and 26 for out of 36 in Pierrefitte.
On January 4, the installation municipal council will be held at Saint-Denis town hall, bringing together the 94 municipal councilors. It is only at the next municipal elections that the number of elected officials will be significantly reduced, possibly around 60. Until then, Mathieu Hanotin is the mayor of the new commune of Saint-Denis and Michel Fourcade his first deputy, while remaining mayor of the delegated municipality of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.
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