You will find below the intervention of Ronan Dantec during the debate in Nantes city council on the wish for the organization of a referendum on the attachment of Loire-Atlantique to Brittany.
Madam Mayor,
Dear colleagues,
It is, I admit to you, with great enthusiasm, that I am going to vote this wish. I would even go so far as to say that it is, for me, a much more important wish than a simple resolution in favor of the reunification of Brittany.
Indeed, wishes in favor of this reunification, there were many: several from the regional council of Brittany, one, let us not forget, from the general council of Loire-Atlantique under the presidency of Patrick Mareschal, hundreds in 50 years from the municipalities of our department. Yet since 1972, when Georges Pompidou refused the redistribution on the pretext of the lack of consensus on the size of the new region, even if everyone agreed that Nantes, Rennes and Brest should be together, nothing has changed. .
The question could therefore have been settled by time and habits, gradually fading … well no, more than ¾ of a century after the decree of the Vichy government, there are still 105,000 citizens. s of Loire-Atlantique to judge this important dossier, deserving of a referendum. It is therefore time, and it is the great merit of this wish, that the elected representatives, who have procrastinated so much, accept and finally stimulate a real debate. And it is really, I believe, in the honor of our majority to finally propose a real method and the means to carry it out.
Of course, and I would say “as usual”, there will be some in this assembly and elsewhere to say, there is more urgency, and they will highlight the real crisis that we are experiencing.
What if, on the contrary, this question fits in well with the strengthening of our collective response at this very special moment? These should be the terms of the debate, and not the endless refrain on “Is Nantes Breton?” », And the existential question am I Breton or Nantes or Loire … Not that these debates on how culture and collective identities make society and solidarity are not important, and too much left fallow, at the risk that others The seeds of nationalism and xenophobia are planted there, but this is not the only issue. The first for us, in times of crisis, is the reorganization of territorial public action.
The health and ecological crises show the need for more autonomous and resilient territories, more robust in the control of their destiny, more in link between cities and countryside, a requirement which is illustrated for example by the tensions of supply of the large urban centers. during the first confinement. We therefore need strong regions federating mutually supportive territories, to the common imagination.
This crisis says the precariousness of a growing part of our population, quick victim when the labor market shrinks. We therefore need regions capable of structuring coherent economic sectors, in order to preserve and develop employment for all. Tourism, Shipbuilding, Marine energies … the debate will have to say whether we rely on the most relevant administrative divisions to develop them.
The debate which begins finally arrives in its time. We are going to turn a page, that of the establishment of metropolises of balance, dear to Olivier Guichard, and so brilliantly built here by Jean-Marc Ayrault and his teams. These metropolises have changed Brittany and the west of France, they have made it possible to reverse migratory flows. But they are also at an impasse, they concentrate employment but no longer manage to produce enough accessible housing, and excluded from their city center these small middle classes whose fragility underlines the crisis. They must imperatively discuss with the medium-sized towns about rebalancing economic activities and services. A new paradigm is emerging: metropolises in dialogue and solidarity with other inter-municipal authorities, what we call the alliance of territories; but also relying on strong regions capable of participating in this dialogue, to lead to real planning within the framework of regional plans for land use planning, sustainable development and equality of the territories (SRADDET).
And here we have a difficulty. For our region, the most structuring triangle today is Nantes-Rennes-Vannes, and it influences all the other territories. I salute, Madam Mayor, your commitment to strengthening the Nantes-Rennes axis, but it cannot be enough. I do not believe for a moment that it is possible to work on a balanced spatial planning without a single region overseeing it. The regions, in fact, do not have much dialogue with each other, even if they can display the opposite. Some may thus remember François Fillon, then president of the Pays de la Loire region, speaking Breton to the regional council of Brittany and showing his willingness to cooperate … but in Châteaubriant, you have to change dock to go from a Tram-Train to a TER, and thus go from Nantes to Rennes.
Some, here, live their public actions mainly within the framework of Nantes and the Loire-Atlantique, it is their space of action and reflection, for others, this space of action, of political imagination, is historic Brittany, and they continue to invest a great deal in it without losing a single moment the thread of their engagement in Nantes territory, for some finally, but in my opinion less numerous, it is the region of the Pays de la Loire.
The debate that begins must therefore allow us to exchange, with our experiences, without taboos or posture, on these different perceptions of the issues and relevant areas of action. It should make it possible to update the data on interactions between Nantes and the other Breton territories, it should allow a new dialogue with all the communities concerned and the two administrative regions, and it should lead to a true democratic process accepted by all.
We will not respond to the major challenges ahead of us on ecology and solidarity without a new articulation and strengthening of the action capacities of local authorities, which implies coherent perimeters. I am therefore convinced of it: if we lead the debate on the reunification of Brittany in depth, we will shed light on our future well beyond the sole subject of the question put to referendum.
Thank you–
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