La intermunicipalidad francesa: entre alternativa y motor para la fusión de municipios

Abstract

Given that French history has established municipalities as the fundamental democratic unit, reducing their number has met with strong resistance. The law attempted to force them to merge in 1971, but its failure hindered the progress of intermunicipality, perceived as competing with municipalities. It was not until the decentralisation of 1982 put small municipalities in difficulty that effective intermunicipality became desirable as an alternative to merger. Although intermunicipality made significant progress in the early 2000s, it remained unsatisfactory from a qualitative point of view. The state then carried out an authoritarian reform of intermunicipal cooperation, which, after 2010, flourished and ended up becoming the driving force behind municipal mergers: the law authorised voluntary mergers, which were used by municipalities to gain more weight within intermunicipal cooperation and obtain additional financial resources to act on their own. Despite the success of this movement, the State was more attached to intermunicipality than to the merger of municipalities, promoting it to the point of forcing merged municipalities from the same association to join a new association. Even when community municipalities were created in 2019, it is difficult to merge a community of at least 15,000 inhabitants into a single municipality in order to benefit from the exemption from joining a group. Thus, inter-municipal cooperation has been weakened because it is accused of being gigantic and of turning municipalities into empty shells, and the merger of municipalities is at a standstill.