Emblematic elected of the Caledonian capital for twenty-eight years, he had led the first college government of the island. He died on June 1, at the age of 90 years.
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Born August 31, 1931 in the popular district of the Tir Valley in Nouméa, Jean Lècs died there, Wednesday 1
Anyone who has lived in the Caledonian capital during her years of mandate remembers her wanderings every Saturday morning in the merchant rue de l’Alma, punctuated by sound “So, how are you?” in a press release published on the site From the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the “life devoted to the service of our country, New Caledonia and Peace” of this figure of the Caledonian chessboard. “The memory of Jean lècques obliges us,” concluded the head of state, while, after three not at independence in referendums in 2018, 2020 and 2021, a new institutional status remains to be built for New Caledonia.
Ardent supporter of his maintenance in France, Jean Lècs had become, in May 1999, and until March 2001, the first president of the college government, created by the Noumea agreement. Signatory of this gradual decolonization agreement, under the rally for Caledonia in the Republic (RPCR), he had also signed in 1988 the Matignon agreements, which brought peace on the pebble after several years of deadly violence between loyalists of European origin and Kanak independence.
From an old Caledonian family, the oldest ascendent of which arrived in the archipelago in 1859, Jean Les, whom all the Caledonians called “Fifils”, a nickname acquired on the school benches by this only child , invested in politics from his law studies in Grenoble. Fervent Catholic, Gaullist and European, he adheres to the popular republican movement, finding in Christian democracy the appropriate incarnation of his ideas.
Back on his native island, Jean Lècs, who became a notary, militates the Caledonian Union (UC), a reforming party whose motto “two colors, a single people” seduces this bourgeois sensitive to social issues. It was under the banner of the UC that he was also elected for the first time in 1967 in the territorial assembly, which he presides several times. He will be re -elected without discontinuing until 2009 in this deliberative institution, which in 1985 took the name of congress.
“A man of peace”
In disagreement with the “independence” of the UC, this “lover of France” moves away from the 1970s to create the Liberal Caledonian movement (MLC). But while the cleavage is tightened between pro-France and separatists, the MLC, to avoid divisions, blew in 1978 in the common house of the loyalists, the RPCR, created by the influential and charismatic Jacques Lafleur.
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