In an interview with the JDD on Sunday, Laurent Wauquiez said that when he took the Region to the left at the end of 2015, “the culture budget was 59 million euros” and “today 77 million”.
“These figures are false”, assures the regional environmental group in a statement, saying that the president of the region “accumulates lies and bad faith on the cultural policy of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region which he presides”.
According to these elected officials, the provisional budget of the Auvergne and Rhône-Alpes regions has indeed increased from 53.7 million euros in 2015 for cultural and artistic activities (14.7 million in investment, 39 million in operation) to 42, 9 million in 2023 (11.1 million in investment, 31.8 million in operation). “This represents a 19% drop in operating grants to cultural actors since 2015,” they calculated, detailing the figures in a table.
Laurent Wauquiez had assured in this same interview with the JDD that “the majority of the credits of the Ministry of Culture are reserved for Paris, the Île-de-France Region and a few metropolises” by evoking “a two-speed culture”. Thus, to circumvent this inequality, he affirms that “rebalancing is the guideline of my policy” by taking the example of the Opéra de Lyon… from which he had “slashed 500,000 euros last year… “, according to the JDD.
“If we approve of the need for a necessary rebalancing at the national level, this cannot be done to the detriment of the structures financed in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, by artificially opposing the metropolises against the rural territories”, estimates the regional ecological group. The Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region is penultimate among the regions of France in its support for culture, “with 8.6 euros per year and per inhabitant only”, recall the green elected officials.
“Since last year’s cuts which affected both cities and rural departments, no effective rebalancing has taken place and venues such as festivals working in the countryside have seen their subsidies reduced or eliminated”, emphasizes their press release.
“Beyond the battle of figures, it is the ideological battle that Laurent Wauquiez is waging against the cultural sectors that worries us”, assures the text, pointing to the abolition or reduction of subsidies to structures considered as “political opponents” , such as the Readings Under the Tree Festival in Chambon-sur-Lignon in 2022, the TNG in Lyon and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in 2023.
According to the opposition of the Greens in the JDD, “between 600,000 and 1 million euros in subsidies have been eliminated, after a first reduction of 4 million euros in the spring of 2022”.
