Minimum size: 762 km²
Maximum size: 1,158 km²
Exact size will be known by the Autumn of next year.
There will be a metropolitan council (
conseil de la métropole du Grand Paris) made up of representatives from the communes (each commune will have from 1 to 5 representatives in the council, depending on the size of their population, except the City of Paris which will have 90 councilors in the council; in total the metropolitan council will be made up of 337 councilors at its minimum extent, i.e. 124 communes).
Above the metropolitan council there will be the president of the Greater Paris metropolitan council (
président du conseil de la métropole du Grand Paris). He will be a little bit what the Mayor of London is to Greater London. Unlike in London, he won't be elected by the citizens but instead he will be elected by the councilors in the metropolitan council, who themselves won't be elected but will be appointed by the municipal councils of the communes, who are elected by the citizens in the municipal elections.
As you can see, it's a very undemocratic organization for a structure that will manage the urban issues of 7 million people. The deputies in the National Assembly voted in favor of having half of the metropolitan councilors elected directly by the citizens in 2020 (there will be municipal elections in 2014 and 2020), but the Senators rejected it. After a complicated back and forth, I see that the latest version of the bill which should be signed by the president in the coming days says that the government must present a report to the parliament regarding the direct election of the metropolitan councilors by 2015, and a law organizing the direct election of the metropolitan councilors must be passed in parliament before Jan. 1, 2017.
At this point it is unclear how many of the metropolitan councilors will be directly elected by the citizens from 2020 onwards (half of them? all of them?). It will probably be a matter of debate until the end of 2016. What's certain is from Jan. 1, 2016 to the municipal elections in March 2020, the metropolitan council of Greater Paris will be made up of unelected councilors appointed by the municipal councils of the communes making up the Greater Paris Metropolis, with the City of Paris sending 90 councilors to the metropolitan council (all of them from the majority party I suppose, so if the Socialist-Green-Communist coalition wins the municipal elections of the City of Paris in March 2014 by 50.01%, the 90 representatives of the City of Paris from Jan. 1, 2016 to March 2020 will nonetheless be 100% Socialist-Green-Communist).
To make things even worse, it is unclear at this point whether the Mayor of Paris could also be President of the Greater Paris metropolitan council. The recently passed law banning politicians from holding 2 executive offices at the same time seems to indicate that he/she couldn't. So we would end up with 3 different persons representing Paris: the Mayor of Paris (probably Socialist Anne Hidalgo), the President of the Greater Paris metropolitan council (either Socialist Jean-Marie Le Guen or Socialist Claude Bartolone, as things are shaping up), and the President of the Paris Region (Île-de-France), currently Socialist Jean-Paul Huchon, but perhaps center-right Valérie Pécresse after the regional elections in 2015. Valérie Pécresse, by the way, the center-right opposition leader in the regional council, is opposed to the Greater Paris Metropolis. She says it's the Paris Region that should be the metropolitan structure for Paris.
French politics.
