UGGC Avocats is proud to have supported the Fédération Française des Trucs qui Marchent (FFTM) for its 2024 edition and to assist it in structuring its association committed to an “implicative” democracy.
Raphaël Ruegger, co-founder of the FFTM, gives us his mood…
Things that work to transform France
Not everything is rosy in France, the continuous news channels are there to remind us of this in real time and the state elites sometimes seem to struggle to impose their solutions. At the other end of the aptly named territorial millefeuille, we find the local elected officials. Numbering 500,000, including nearly 35,000 mayors, they are the entrepreneurs of political action closest to the French… and undoubtedly the most appreciated as evidenced by the trust that the latter place in them (60% of French people have confidence in their mayor vs. 39% in their MP, for example ).
A French Federation of Things That Work
These are the local elected officials that we have been meeting for three years to discover their “things that work”, these local initiatives that have proven themselves on the ground and that can be duplicated in other municipalities in France. Committed daily to the well-being of their residents and the proper development of their territory, they are doubling their ingenuity to imagine and implement remarkable solutions. With the Fédération Française des Trucs qui Marchent , an independent, non-partisan association, we have given ourselves the mission of identifying them, making them known and encouraging their duplication.
In most cases, the initiatives we identify are the result of collective work between elected officials, sometimes with residents, associations or institutions, by mobilizing existing laws. Some examples from different corners of France…
Soft paths for children… on residents’ plots
In the pretty Alsatian village of Muttersholtz, as in thousands of communes in France, the era of the automobile inherited from the Trente Glorieuses has left its mark on the town centre with departmental roads used daily by nearly 8,000 vehicles. It is hard to imagine letting children go to school on foot or by bike? And yet, here, more than 90% of the 140 children enrolled in primary school do not take the car to go to school. The commune has created “soft paths” between residential areas and the primary school, sometimes passing through the land of private owners. In return, the owners concerned have obtained additional plots of land that belonged to the commune or building permits for small extensions of their building zone.
Beauty Will Save the World
In 2021, in the middle of lockdown, the mayor of Saint-Dizier in Haute-Marne seized on a quote from Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot , “Beauty will save the world”. With his municipal team, they imagined displaying “beauty” everywhere in public spaces by diverting existing street furniture. They then reserved all the advertising panels in the city for a few weeks and exhibited works by great masters of art history (Van Gogh, Hokusai, Caillebotte, etc.). The initiative appealed to residents but also to elected officials from other municipalities in France. Three years after its launch in the city of Bragarde, no fewer than 32 municipalities have duplicated the initiative thanks to the support of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, which makes part of its collections available to them through an agreement and the purchase of copyright at a negotiated rate.
An “implicative” democracy
It is a tool that is rarely used by local authorities: committees (article L2143-2 of the General Code of Local Authorities). Beyond the “commissions”, decision-making bodies reserved for elected officials, some of which are mandatory, such as finance, urban planning and public procurement, all other skills of the municipality can involve residents. This is how in Verteillac in Dordogne, eleven thematic committees were created: culture, sport, communication, entertainment, etc. Of the 600 inhabitants of the municipality, more than a quarter are involved in the committees. The result is convincing: Verteillac, which no longer had a festival, now organizes more than 100 concerts per year with its entertainment committee, which are announced in the municipal bulletins written and laid out by the communication committee. The culture committee has published a book on a local artist! This renewed dynamic has motivated the creation of around ten associations and the creation of twelve businesses and craft activities.
These few examples are evidence of a new mindset that consists of changing the focus to change the way we look at public and political action. Let’s focus all our energy on what works and could be scaled up rather than on what divides us without positively changing the lives of the French. Things that work can transform France, and we can all contribute to this through our commitment as close as possible to home.
