Today the president of the Regional Council of Alsace-Champagne-Ardennes-Lorraine announced the name approved by many web users from a selection of four names. The newly created region will be called ‘Grand-Est’.
Grand-Est: A New Name for a New Region
Four names competed to replace the provisional name of the region formed by combining the names of the three former regions:
- Acalie,
- Nouvelle-Austrasie,
- Rhin-Champagne,
- and Grand Est.
The people of Alsace, Champagne-Ardennes and Lorraine were asked to choose one of the four names online, and 277,077 participants voted between the 14th of March and the 1st of April 2016. The result was announced today by Philippe Richert, the President of the Regional Council. ‘Grand Est’ was highly rated by 75% of the votes cast and is the big winner, followed by Nouvelle-Austrasie (10.4 %), Rhin-Champagne (9.8 %) and Acalie (4.8 %).
The name will be submitted to the Regional Council on the 29th of April 2016 in a plenary meeting. The Conseil d’État and the French government will give their approvals by the 1st of July 2016. The Conseil d’État (France’s highest authority for administrative law) will have until the 1st of October 2016 to issue a decree to officialise the new name. To ‘preserve the cultural identities’ of the region, the name will keep the subtitle ‘Regional Council of Alsace, Champagne-Ardenne, Lorraine’.
The law of the 17th of December 2014 designated Strasbourg as the administrative capital of the new region.
