2024-05-12 16:36:16
Emmanuel Macron attends a customary ceremony in his honor in Touho, northern New Caledonia, on July 25, 2023. RAPHAEL LAFARGUE / AFP
It is, in the mind of the Head of State, a mark of appeasement. While serious tensions have been agitating New Caledonia for several weeks between loyalist supporters and independence opponents of the reform of the Caledonian electoral body, Emmanuel Macron announced to the territory’s elected officials that the Congress planned in Versailles to seal this constitutional reform will not be convened. immediately. Stated goal: give yourself a few weeks to relaunch discussions between the two blocs.
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Monday May 13 and Tuesday May 14, the National Assembly must decide on the text, already adopted by the Senate, which plans to open voting in the next provincial elections to all citizens residing in New Caledonia for ten years. The loyalists are demanding it. But the separatists demand the withdrawal of the project because for them, only the current provisions, which have “frozen” the electoral body to natives and residents who arrived before 1998, will be able to protect them from “recolonization”.
The Head of State had the possibility of summoning parliamentarians to Congress at the end of May, even if this meeting would have rather taken place in mid-June given the agenda, observed several deputies in recent days. A schedule which therefore already made it possible to talk to each other before the Congress was held. But the message delivered by the Elysée counts: by not summoning the parliamentarians straight away, the president first reminds us that he is in charge of the matter.
Call for strike
It is a question of reaching the great political agreement on the future status of the territory, which has eluded for two years the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, responsible until now for steering exchanges, and with whom the separatists do not want no more talking. Emmanuel Macron asks the government, as soon as the constitutional project is voted on in the Assembly, to take the initiative of inviting all Caledonian officials to Paris, in order to negotiate on two subjects: the future institutions of the territory in connection with France , and its economic future weighed down today by the nickel crisis.
Flags of the socialist Kanak National Liberation Front during a demonstration in Nouméa, April 13, 2024. THEO ROUBY / AFP
Will this be enough? This Monday, the road and air transport sectors, as well as the hotel industry, were called to strike by the Union of Kanak and Exploited Workers, the union of the independence movement. The threat hangs over mines and metallurgical factories, the blocking of which is being considered. The airport on the island of Lifou will not open its doors, just like the town halls of several pro-independence municipalities.
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