Each district now has its District Council

The urban community of Lille will celebrate February 4 its forty years including eighteen as your Presidency. With a feeling of duty accomplished

I spent thirty years in the city of Lille and eighteen years in the urban community. My community, and communal activities here have been a true happiness. If I had to redo, I would rephrase an eighteen year lease. But I decided not to go further. Undoubtedly, Lille is transformed and the urban community of even more dramatically. She was able to impose and, like other communities, acquire its letters of nobility. There was much to do and we could do much more, here, passing the border and creating the Eurodistrict. One million people on this side of the border, one million, it will make a great European district to constitute a great European metropolis. To achieve this size, and weigh at European level, it remains to associate further mining basin, or a million people. We then even a set of three million inhabitants. This challenge, I think that I would have pointed to the next mandate. But still, I do not want the renew.

Best to your eyes that embodies the pursuit of your action

My action has always been the result of a collective work. But one that I have chosen is Martine Aubry. I am confident that she will be re-elected Mayor of Lille. The urban community, it brings together 85 communes, in the greater political diversity. Its representatives to the Community Council are referred to the second degree. In contrast to the mayors, they are not in touch with the population and, in the metropolis, the battle still raged. When it created the urban community, the six cities that have joined Lille did not resented. They preferred to stay within their borders. The Lille metropolitan area is divided with, on the one hand, the Northeast, Roubaix and Tourcoing slope, industrial, struck by the great depression, and, in the face, the southern slope, Lille, who in the years 1970-1980, began to take advantage of the game this. With Mr. Diligent, who was Mayor of Roubaix, we have been able to put an end to the war, the two sides.

The spirit of consensus which the metropolis is t - he endure

I think. The future President of the urban community and those who lead it would do well to respect consensus management. The left being majority of just one or two votes, it is essential. As President, I would have always liked. Mr Daubresse, the leader of the right, is the first Vice President. Everyone is together to wear a large urban community. But we remain on our guard. Our political ideas are not the same. In a few months, I drill the plain battle on the side of Martine Aubry.

Would the designation of the community Councillors by universal suffrage not make their action more effective

All the Presidents of the urban communities, except in Marseille, where this structure is the most recent, are for the election by universal suffrage. I have always defended him. But it is not easy. Commons fear be dispossessed, that I do not want. Universal suffrage must be exercised with a quite appropriate voting method. Otherwise, the urban communities could be equipped with a special status or granted major status of territorial community, they who manage budgets equivalent to that of a General Council. Paris enjoys a special status of territorial community, why not they

Act II of Raffarin decentralization has not allowed it. Can this folder grow in the coming years

Jean-Pierre Raffarin led with the France from the top, all in advancing finally decentralization. He has been listening to our expectations to see the France with sufficiently powerful cities. And if we have not been completely heard, far from it, there was dialogue. Today, decentralization is absent from the official discourse. The President of the Republic, which takes us in different landscapes with a distinctive style, not talk. It is there. For my part, I always worked tirelessly to the expansion of cities, the gathering of Commons. The France into account 36,000 or so that Europe, with 22,000 to 23,000 have fewer than 700 inhabitants and budgets which do nothing. It should be! This is why I defended the intermunicipal. Jean-Pierre Chevenement, under the Government of Lionel Jospin, had the good idea to give subsidies to the mayors who wanted to play the game. We saw then the intermunicipal take off. The right-wing governments did not benefit, and I regret, this new spirit of cooperation to universal suffrage.

The Jospin Government had hardly been more move this folder. The left is more decentralization or not

Lionel Jospin was not opposed to decentralization. It is in our country: some are décentralisateurs, other jacobins. However, Lionel Jospin had the great merit boost reflection on decentralization in confident me a mission. My 154 proposals, the valiant Minister finally fired a number of benign laws. Could have been, is true, go further. But Bercy dream to feed all the allocations of State territorial communities. It is much more convenient to let elected officials rise tax! And that's how it comes to

having to fight to Constitutionalize a threshold of fiscal autonomy. Elected officials claim the honour and the right to tax, mark of a true local democracy. We need to defend this freedom and get a reform to taxes fairer and better adapted. We are told that we can always use additional taxes for households, but it is quite inadequate and inappropriate. Need us a broader tax, which affects not only employees, but all income, including stock-options. Tax that is closest to this solution, it is the CSG.

You would have to new Prime Minister today, what would be your priority site for decentralization

I shall begin by saying that should provide the France of cities much larger, much more powerful. Paris has only 2 million inhabitants, Lyon 1 million inhabitants... Need to move to the level of our large European neighbours. I note that German cities are extraordinary reserves of SMEs. The France not to leaves on the industrial plan if it is not the major cities and it is in does not means. Hence my decision here create a Franco-Belgian district which will allow us to be a great European capital.

The left always desired a laboratory local public management and democracy. Is it still

We keep this innovation capacity. Urban community of Lille continues to innovate in the transportation, disposal of waste, etc. If I was thirty years Mayor of Lille, I also must to a decision that I took in the early years of participatory democracy. Each district now has its District Council. Our experience has been profitable in this area and this was later theorized by Ségolène Royal. Local democracy, I wished, as soon as the joint programme of the left with François Mitterrand, that foreigners could participate in local, especially municipal elections. This is not yet achieved. It is not that we have dropped the guard, but this idea was still very difficult to go down with the French. However, I think that the time has come, especially after the recent events in the suburbs.

Do you still see Ségolène Royal as the natural of the PS leader

I have chosen and supported Ségolène Royal because I wanted to change and it was this change. Its participatory democracy me was quite. And then she was a woman of strength of unquestionable attractiveness. She did not win but still brought 17 million votes. What I liked less was the end of his campaign, when she challenged the Socialist Party. I am viscerally attached to the Socialist community. I therefore told him: I am still with you but I'm doing two steps back. I must say that it is much corrected since and she took his place. We now pass the municipal elections then designate the first Secretary of our party and, later, its leader. Ségolène remains for me a personality of any foreground.

With a President who took over its function very personal way, the next municipal deadline will t - it not turn to a third round

I hope well! Nicolas Sarkozy does impresses me not too much. I find even that they may be a little extravagant to make too. This will eventually tire, including his supporters. Ultimately, it comes by saying one thing and its opposite. Personally, I have never put in issue friendship that America and the American people, but was it necessary to express it as demonstration and to forget that after all a majority of French did not support what is happening in Iraq, there is another possible policy. On this plan the former President had been well-advised.

Do you share his conception of the role of the Prime Minister

With regard to the attitude of Nicolas Sarkozy in his Prime Minister who still complained he too. The task of the Prime Minister is precisely to free the President for the conduct of the policy of the country. I am a parliamentary regime. And I way all those who want to escape this regime which is one of the major democracies. All I am attached to decentralization, as I am not in the presidentialization of the regime. It may lead to a personal, Bonapartist regime. I think that Nicolas Sarkozy will have trouble gathering the two-thirds of members of Parliament on his project of constitutional review.

And what role should play the Senate

Lionel Jospin spoke of anomaly. This becomes more and more. My Senator mandate ends in 2011, but be minority in perpetuity as I am today, it is not. A democratic regime cannot have a high Assembly always right and whose influence is greater that one might think. The representation of the College that designates the senators is not democratic. The France is more rural, but urban, more to the left. It is elected Senators to represent trees and birds. There is a little bit of abuse all the same! This is not to implead the countryside, but take into account the new forces born with cities. It is a struggle that I lead.