While Emmanuel Macron receives mayors on Wednesday November 17, on the sidelines of the congress of the Association of Mayors of France (AMF), Michel Fournier, the mayor of Voivres in the Vosges, tells franceinfo what it is to be a local elected official rural today and said to have already “had a knife to my throat”. Mayor for more than 30 years of a village of 330 inhabitants, the president of the Association of rural mayors of France (AMRF) believes that mayors have more and more functions and that it is urgent to create a statute of ‘elected. “We have a much stronger social responsibility” than before, according to him.
franceinfo: You have been mayor for over 30 years. Have you seen your function change?
Michel Fournier: Necessarily. We are no longer in the function of the mayor before. He must always be the one who seeks the best balance in his village, but he has many other functions. Today, a mayor has to be a developer, for example. It’s time consuming. It will really be necessary to imagine a true statute of the elected one because that seems essential to us to be able to exercise this function, including in a village. We have a much stronger social responsibility.
“Before, there were many other confessors. Today, it is the mayor who finds himself in this situation.”
Michel Fournier, the mayor of Voivres in the Vosgesto franceinfo
This means that he has to manage – apart from his sovereign problems – the security in his village, the fact of this current society which has become very independent, very selfish.
It is often said that the mayor is “within reach”. Have you experienced it?
Society is a bit in decline and everything that represents authority and, a fortiori, the mayor represents authority in his village … I will not tell my life story but I even, at one point, had a knife under my throat because I was intervening in an incident and the reaction was very, very violent. I spoke to the Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti about it, and it helped to advance the reflection on the fact that each incident or each incivility vis-à-vis an elected representative representing the State must be taken into account. counts and must not have a classification without continuation. It was acted and done by the government.
How are your people doing?
They still have a feeling of oblivion: we don’t talk about us, or when we talk about us we talk about “city” but the notion of “village” is very important. , we have to know it, we have to recognize it. This population has a feeling of oblivion, quite simply because the “buzz” is made elsewhere. Not only in Paris but often in Paris.