French deputies solemnly vote this Tuesday, May 14, on the constitutional reform aimed at expanding the electorate for the provincial elections in New Caledonia. If the National Assembly gives the green light, Parliament will have to ratify the reform in Congress. However, faced with the extreme sensitivity of the issue and the high tensions on the island, Emmanuel Macron will not immediately summon deputies and senators to Versailles. This Monday, the high commission of the Republic on site also announced a curfew.
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The French president made it known on Sunday May 12: we must give one last chance to a dialogue between loyalists, very favorable to the unfreezing of the lists, and separatists, fiercely opposed. All Caledonian political sensitivities will soon be invited to Paris to reach a global agreement on the institutions of the archipelago. At stake is the reform which aims to expand the electoral body, frozen since 1998, during the provincial elections, crucial on the island. It would allow residents for at least 10 years to participate.
17,000 kilometers from Paris, dialogue seems impossible
The oppositions are head-on on the stone. On the one hand, the loyalists, strengthened by a victory for the “no” during the three independence referendums provided for by the Nouméa Accords of 1998. They believe that the freezing of the electorate, preventing one in five voters from electing the powerful Caledonian Congress, no longer makes sense. On the other side, the separatistsat the origin of the blockages on the island.
Not only do they not recognize the result of the last referendum of 2021, but also believe that the limitation of the electoral lists is a bulwark against what they consider to be colonization. Since 1998, many metropolitan residents have settled in New Caledonia, but also French people from Wallis and Futuna, another French territory in the Pacific. The situation is made even more complicated by the current difficulties in the nickel sector, the Island’s main resource.
Read also“New Caledonia is not an insignificant region of France”
Curfew in Nouméa
This very tense context finds an echo in France. The left is calling for a withdrawal of the text and the establishment of a dialogue mission headed by the Prime Minister.
Gabriel Attal is also called, in the newspaper The world, by several of his predecessors such as Édouard Philippe and Manuel Valls to take over the file currently managed by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, to calm minds.
At the request of the tenant of Place Beauvau, reinforcements were sent to New Caledonia: four mobile gendarmerie squadrons, two sections of the CRS8, RAID police officers and GIGN gendarmes. The High Commission of the Republic in New Caledonia especially announced a curfew for the night from Tuesday to Wednesday in the urban area of Nouméa, scene of unrest of a “ high intensity » echoing the examination at Paris of constitutional reform.
Read alsoNew Caledonia: a parliamentary report wants an “impartial mission” for a “global agreement”