The organizations tasked with this “restitution” (the pollster OpinionWay, the consulting firms Roland Berger, Res Publica, and Missions Publiques) presented the results yesterday.
The contributions from the French participants in the grand debate reveal major and consensual trends, such as tax reductions, and deep divergences, like determining which taxes to lower. The urgency of climate change is widely acknowledged by the debate participants, along with a rejection of behavioral and environmental taxes.
The Prime Minister promised “powerful solutions” and mentioned future collaboration with “intermediary bodies” and “local elected officials.”
The verdict will be delivered to Emmanuel Macron in mid-April. Measures might be rolled out gradually until summer.
Four “demands” highlighted:
• “Reduce taxes more quickly.” “The first demand is essentially immense fiscal exasperation,” stated the Prime Minister during a speech at the Grand Palais.
• Rethink “our urban planning rules.” “We live in a country where, in some places, we no longer see each other, we no longer talk, and when public services close,” the feeling of abandonment is even stronger, explains Edouard Philippe.
• “A democratic demand.” “This experience must be useful for us to build” a more direct and representative democracy, he asserts, without giving more details on the measures that could accomplish this.
• “A climate emergency.” “A clear fact: unlike residents of other countries, the French are not climate skeptics,” but they do not want climate efforts to be “through taxes,” he believes.
1,932,881 online contributions. About 2,800,000 unique visitors accessed the platform granddebat.fr, with 506,000 individual contributors. They submitted 1,364,000 contributions to closed questions and 569,020 contributions to open proposals.
16,337 municipalities opened citizen notebooks, with an average of 21 pages per notebook.
27,400 letters and emails received, amounting to 500 per day, with an average of 4 pages per letter.
250 institutional contributions.
10,134 local meetings. An average of 45 participants per meeting, totaling nearly 500,000 participants. 50% of the meetings were organized by elected officials, 30% by citizens, and 20% by associations and NGOs. 282 meetings took place outside France, in 82 countries.
And 21 citizen conferences, 7 of which were overseas and one dedicated to youth, with a total of 1,404 participants, randomly selected.
Approximately 630,000 pages processed. 45,000 documents, which amounts to more than 629,000 typewritten or handwritten pages, have been processed by the grand debate mission and its service providers.
150 people performed the document processing, either manually or with software, in addition to the 40 people attached to the grand debate organizing mission.
The cost of the grand debate, initially projected around 10 million euros, amounts to approximately 12 million euros.
