Poitou-Charentes to disappear in shake-up of French regions?

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The Balladur committee were voting yesterday to finalise their proposals for a radical shake up of the French administrative regions. The proposals are believed to advocate the carving up of Poitou-Charentes in favour of enlarged Limousin and Aquitaine regions.

The committee was set up by Nicolas Sarkozy to look into reducing the number of regions from 22 to 15, with the aim of reducing administration costs and making regions more powerful economically. The report containing the proposals has not been released publicly, but newspaper La Liberation reported on Wednesday a view of what the new map could look like. Details of the proposals should become available in the next week.

 

The proposals are thought to include plans to carve-up Poitou-Charentes in favour of enlarged Aquitaine and Limousin regions, although exactly what would transfer to where is not clear. Other proposals that had been put forward previously were the merger of Poitou-Charentes with Aquitaine, and the merger of Limousin with Auvergne, although there was strong opposition to both of these proposals from elected officials, and these have been largely dismissed.

 

There are some who argue that this project is politically motivated. With the opposition Party Socialiste (PS) holding power in 20 of the 22 regions, it is thought that a re-drawing of the administrative map might result in a change in fortune for the ruling UMP. The concept of doing away with the region headed by former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal was largely dismissed last year, after Dominique Bussereau and Jean-Pierre Raffarin suggested fusing Poitou-Charentes with Aquitaine.

 

Other proposed changes include the merger of the two Normandy regions, and the merger of Auvergne and Rhone-Alps amongst other controversial plans.  In short, the new map of the French regions has not yet been fixed, and the proposals are just the start of the debate. However, whatever the eventual changes look like, they are set to be implemented by 2014.