2023-09-13 13:26:32
His position on possible autonomy for the island is eagerly awaited. Seven months after his last visit, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin is traveling to Corsica on Wednesday and Thursday. He must meet, from 4:30 p.m., with the autonomist president of the executive Gilles Simeoni before participating, in Ajaccio, in a general assembly of the island’s mayors.
“We expect a lot from this visit,” explains the president of the association of mayors of Haute-Corse, Ange-Pierre Vivoni, who is banking on “the same program as the meeting which was scheduled for October 2022 and which did not have took place, that is to say talking about water, sanitation, household waste and town planning and of course autonomy.
But “the question of autonomy is not a major question for mayors”, he added, recalling that “80% of mayors do not have a label in Corsica” and that “95% of municipalities have union lists” mixing right-wing, left-wing and nationalist elected officials who “all have a different opinion” on the subject.
Red lines
However, the subject should be omnipresent on Wednesday evening during the minister’s dinner with the presidents of political groups of the Corsican Assembly.
This trip comes as the Corsican Assembly failed at the beginning of July to agree on a single autonomy project for this island of 340,000 inhabitants. At the end of two days of extraordinary session, the elected islanders had transmitted to the government and to President Emmanuel Macron two projects, one from the quasi-united nationalists and the other from the right-wing opposition.
At the end of February, when discussions on the institutional future of the island resumed, Emmanuel Macron was ready to include possible developments in his constitutional reform project. While setting red lines: maintaining Corsica in the Republic and refusing to create two categories of citizens. It is up to Corsican elected officials and the Ministry of the Interior to present a proposal.
Autonomy or adaptation of French laws?
The nationalists’ text, adopted by the Corsican Assembly where they occupy 46 of the 63 seats, calls for “legal recognition of the Corsican people”, “a status of co-officiality of the Corsican language” and recognition of the “link between the Corsican people and their land” via “resident status”.
This text takes up the main lines of Gilles Simeoni’s report on his vision of autonomy for Corsica, namely that of legislative power in all areas for the Corsican Assembly, except those relating to sovereign powers.
The second text, from the minority right-wing opposition, calls for a simple “power of adaptation” of French laws to Corsican specificities, without autonomous management of education and health and without transfer of taxation.
The riots, the trigger
For Ange-Pierre Vivoni, “on autonomy, if there are declarations, it will be the President of the Republic who will make them”. A president whom the mayors invited to go to Corsica, “like his predecessors”, for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the island and who could make the trip at the end of the month, according to several sources close to the matter.
The fatal assault in prison, on March 2, 2022, of the independence activist Yvan Colonna, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of the prefect Erignac in 1998 in Ajaccio, had triggered violent demonstrations in Corsica.
These clashes culminated in riots on March 13 in Bastia with 102 injured, including 77 among the police. Sent to Corsica by the president-candidate Macron to calm the situation, the Minister of the Interior had opened the possibility of discussions which could “go as far as autonomy”.
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