Catherine Trautmann, the Socialist mayor of Strasbourg, has said a Deloitte audit of the city and the Eurométropole, presented on September 18, showed an “explosion of debt” under her Green predecessor and a situation she called grave, urgent and unlike anything in her 40 years in politics.
The Eurométropole is the 33-commune metropolitan authority around Strasbourg, the official seat of the European Parliament, and Trautmann also presides over it.
Trautmann defeated Jeanne Barseghian, the Green mayor from 2020 to March 2026, and commissioned the audit at the start of her term. A former French culture minister and MEP, she had already been mayor from 1989 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001.
Presenting it with first deputy Mathieu Cahn, Eurométropole finance vice-president Caroline Barrière and Deloitte partner Loïc Muller, she said: “The figures show a situation that is grave, heavy, worrying and, I dare say, urgent. If we do nothing we will not merely be at the foot of the wall, we will be in the wall — unless we are already there.”
She set two aims: To leave “over-indebtedness” and to rebuild savings and room for manoeuvre. She has not yet cancelled named projects and described a rise in local taxes as a “last resort”.
A budget-orientation debate is due in January 2027 and a vote in March.
Trautmann said she was “indignant” at the results of an audit she commissioned.
Deloitte described the city’s finances as “severely degraded”.
City debt is put at about €494 million in 2026, against €241 million in 2020. The Eurométropole’s is put at €911 million, against €579 million.
Interest costs have risen from €2.3 million for the city and €9.7 million for the metropolis to €11.7 million and €22.7 million.
“The situation at the Metropolis, in trend, is worse than in the City,” Trautmann noted. “I thought that the Metropolis was the way to maintain a certain level of investment and support for the activity and development of our services. Now I realised that it was the opposite. I was shocked. We have to react.”
The city’s capacity to repay debt is estimated at 21.5 years, against a legal alert threshold of 12. It stood at 5.8 years in 2020 and 10 in 2024.
Gross savings have fallen from €41.6 million in 2020 to €23 million in 2026, a drop of 45 per cent. According to the audit, Strasbourg has the lowest gross savings per inhabitant of France’s 11 largest cities.
Net savings are projected at minus €12 million in 2026.
Muller said operating savings of €35 million to €40 million a year would be needed from 2027-28 to put the city right, and about €45 million for the Eurométropole.
He said net city debt rose by about €100,000 a day during the Green Barseghian term.
The annex budget for mobility rose from about €20 million to €60 million. Trautmann said some large projects already commissioned might not be fundable in this mandate.
Barseghian’s group, Strasbourg juste et vivante, said it stood by borrowing that “financed the ecological transition and everyday public services”.
The former majority also dismissed the audit as “a €100,000 political operation”. The review cost the city €57,000 and the Eurométropole €46,000.
Former first deputy for finance Syamak Agha Babaei accused Trautmann of “political manipulation” and “catastrophic vocabulary”.
He said the Greens had promised a “great ecological and social loan” in 2020 and had kept the promise with new schools, less energy-hungry buildings and planted schoolyards.
“I have no regrets. I am not a financier, I am a political militant,” he said.
He cited a higher savings figure than Deloitte’s for 2026.
The Regional Court of Accounts had already recorded the city’s debt rising from €194 million at the end of 2019 to €333 million at the end of 2023.
France’s public debt reached a new record high of €3,460.5 billion at the end of 2025. https://t.co/X0ABemovK1
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) March 27, 2026
