Jon Fraenkel is Professor of Comparative Politics at Victoria University of Wellington
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 6:39 am
With the referendum concluded, the anti-independence parties of New Caledonia now want to assert their advantage by ending the restrictions on the right to vote, which also apply to provincial elections, and by putting an end to the “rebalancing” programs. »Which give a disproportionate share to local government spending. provinces with an indigenous majority.
The limits of the Noumea Voting Rights Accord may contradict Gaullist traditions of “equal citizenship” and “one and indivisible republic”, but they were an essential part of the agreement. Its signatories acknowledged that New Caledonia’s population had been unfairly inflated in the 1970s and 1980s by the arrival of thousands of colonists from the continent, many of whom still circulate back and forth on short-term contracts.
Like the anti-independence parties of New Caledonia, President phone number library Macron and his Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu now affirm that the era of the Nouméa accords is over and that the time has come to establish a new status. However, the Noumea Accord provides that, whatever the outcome of the third referendum, “the political organization established by the 1998 agreement will remain in force, at its last stage of development, without the possibility of going back, this “irreversibility” being constitutionally guaranteed. ‘.
New Caledonia therefore still has an institutional apparatus based on a constitutionalized pact between two communities – which is based on the search for a compromise – but now with a referendum result which has led to a break with the search for a political settlement. mutually agreed.
In the long term, therefore, Paris may have shot himself in the foot. Because of the insistence on a non-consensual referendum without Kanak participation, the moral authority of the future will belong to those who seek a more thorough but fairer competition, with the involvement of all the communities.
He is indebted to Denise Fisher and Adrian Muckle for their comments on an earlier version.
The limits of the Noumea Voting Rights Accord may contradict Gaullist traditions of “equal citizenship” and “one and indivisible republic”, but they were an essential part of the agreement. Its signatories acknowledged that New Caledonia’s population had been unfairly inflated in the 1970s and 1980s by the arrival of thousands of colonists from the continent, many of whom still circulate back and forth on short-term contracts.
Like the anti-independence parties of New Caledonia, President phone number library Macron and his Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu now affirm that the era of the Nouméa accords is over and that the time has come to establish a new status. However, the Noumea Accord provides that, whatever the outcome of the third referendum, “the political organization established by the 1998 agreement will remain in force, at its last stage of development, without the possibility of going back, this “irreversibility” being constitutionally guaranteed. ‘.
New Caledonia therefore still has an institutional apparatus based on a constitutionalized pact between two communities – which is based on the search for a compromise – but now with a referendum result which has led to a break with the search for a political settlement. mutually agreed.
In the long term, therefore, Paris may have shot himself in the foot. Because of the insistence on a non-consensual referendum without Kanak participation, the moral authority of the future will belong to those who seek a more thorough but fairer competition, with the involvement of all the communities.
He is indebted to Denise Fisher and Adrian Muckle for their comments on an earlier version.