Sometimes it is the seemingly innocuous misdeeds that speak volumes. For the 40e edition of the Music Festival, the Overseas Ministry had opened its doors, as it does every year, to overseas music, this time dedicating the evening to “sound of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean”. An initiative to “highlighting the cultural diversity of our territories”. All were represented: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion. All but one: Mayotte, forgotten. An “oversight” that was very badly experienced by local cultural and artistic actors.
The fact that the new overseas minister, Yaël Braun-Pivet, barely a month after her appointment, decides to seek the perch of the National Assembly does not risk, either, attenuating the feeling of mistrust that is is installed in the overseas territories vis-à-vis the executive power. While she was to go to New Caledonia to represent the government at the inauguration, in Nouméa, of the statue of the handshake between Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Jacques Lafleur, on June 26, the anniversary date of the Matignon agreements of 1988, she canceled her trip. More than an error, a fault when the conditions for dialogue on the institutional future of the territory must be restored.
The overseas vote in the presidential election was a first electric shock. In the first round, Jean-Luc Mélenchon had clearly won, distancing, with nearly 40% of the vote, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, relegated nearly 20 points behind. In the second round, the far-right candidate had swept away President Emmanuel Macron, candidate for re-election, by collecting nearly 60% of the vote. The legislative elections have inflicted a painful response on the executive power.
A new group at the Assembly
The clearing wave in the overseas territories carried away fifteen of the nineteen candidates invested or who benefited from the support of the Together! coalition, including the brand new Secretary of State for the Sea, Justine Benin, in Guadeloupe. Of the twenty-seven overseas deputies, seventeen are newly elected and only five should sit on the benches of the presidential majority: the dissident MoDem Max Mathiasin in Guadeloupe, the deputy of Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy Frantz Gumbs, the two elected representatives from New Caledonia, Philippe Dunoyer and Nicolas Metzdorf, and Mikaele Seo, member of the territorial majority of Wallis-et-Futuna.
Although, for the latter, uncertainty remains. Indeed, it may well be that he finally joins a new group whose creation was announced on Wednesday June 22, provisionally called “UTIL”, for “Ultramarines, Territories, Insularities, Freedoms”. It aims to bring together up to twenty-five elected officials. Among the ultramarines is notably the Guadeloupe deputy Olivier Serva, ex-La République en Marche and who chaired the delegation to the overseas territories under the previous legislature, who was at the maneuver for the constitution of this group.
You have 55.6% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.