Presidential Election 2022: future of New Caledonia is invited in countryside

After the third referendum that took place on Sunday, the future status of this territory remains to be defined.

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You have to go back to 1988 to see New Caledonia also present in the presidential campaign. Under the then dramatic conditions with the taking of hostages and then assaults against the cave d’ocean. For more than thirty years, the Caledonian file escaped the lights of the presidential election projectors. Appointments in the history of this territory of 280,000, located in the Pacific Ocean, 18,000 kilometers from the metropolis, did not match national deadlines. Until the schedule is required for the term provided by the Nouméa Agreement of 5 May 1998: the referendum consultation on the accession of New Caledonia to full sovereignty, up to a third ballot. In case of two non-successive.

So Emmanuel Macron who had had, for the duration of his five-year, to accompany the end of the process, to organize the three referendums and to engage the discussions with the supporters of independence as with those of the maintenance in The Republic, for the page of the Nouméa Agreement being turned, could emerge a new joint project. Necessary work, which has materialized by the document on the consequences of yes and no, presented to the different Caledonian political forces at the session held in Paris, at the end of May, concluded by a declaration providing for a period of transition until June 30, 2023, to develop a new status.

The head of state had moved to New Caledonia in early May 2018, six months before the first referendum. First president of the Republic to get to Ouvéa, where he had worked to the reconciliation of the memoirs, in this place marked by a painful past, he had said, during a speech delivered in Nouméa, that “France would be less beautiful Without New Caledonia “. Sunday, at the end of the third referendum, he said, “Tonight, France is more beautiful because New Caledonia has decided to stay there.” However, the oppositions and candidates for the presidential election have not spared their criticisms to him, the right and the extreme right blamed him not to have committed to the maintenance of New Caledonia in France.

Passage “in force “

In a video, posted on the 1 Er December, Marine Le Pen called the Caledonians to “demonstrate definitively [their] willingness to stay French, (…) even if Emmanuel Macron did the choice, surprisingly, not to assume the duty entrusted to the President of the Republic by the Constitution of guaranteeing the integrity of the national territory, thus perceiving the destiny of New Caledonia, as of the fact of that of the overseas “. For his part, Eric Zemmour estimates that “Emmanuel Macron acted in ideologist against the interests of France”. “How could he have done differently? He considers that colonization is a crime against history,” he adds in the video he published on December 7th.

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/Media reports.