The Socialists' reforms focused not only on the administrative aspects of local government but also on the political aspects. When Defferre proposed the decentralizing law of March 1982, he was as much concerned about the need for a political revitalization of the periphery as he was about the need for an end to the administrative inefficiency and the costliness of local government. Pierre Mauroy, in his investiture speech as prime minister, insisted that with decentralization “we will give back…to 500,000 elected officials the means for taking responsibility and initiative. We will give to citizens, usagers, consumers, the means of participating, truly, in the organization of their daily lives… To build a new citizenry requires first of all to give the state back to its citizens.”

Once it became evident that the local elected officials who took responsibility and initiative were on the right, however, the left began questioning the political wisdom of decentralization, “stressing, with purely political logic, that it is becoming more and more paradoxical that the Socialists who have power at the center are redistributing it to the periphery.” These members of the left worked against some parts of the reform as vigorously as other groups did to defend their own interests. The result was that whereas electoral reform, especially in terms of the regions, was long overdue by the time it was brought forth, the limitation of the cumul des mandats was delivered only at the very last minute, and the local democracy laws were conceived but never developed.