After six months of conflict, the French parliament has voted to delay New Caledonia’s scheduled provincial and national elections until late 2025. The New Caledonian government, currently led by president Louis Mapou, will remain in office for at least another year.
Delaying the elections until November 2025 simply kicks the can down the road. At some point decisions must be made on New Caledonia’s political future, and that can only happen if a consensus is reached on a replacement for the 1998 Nouméa Accord, the agreement that has governed New Caledonia’s political institutions for more than a quarter of a century.
Under the Accord, voting for New Caledonia’s three provincial assemblies and Congress has been restricted to New Caledonian citizens resident in the islands since before 1998. (Even some locally born New Caledonians don’t meet the current registration and residency requirements.) Over many years, loyalist anti-independence parties have called for an expanded definition of New Caledonian citizenship, taking in more recent arrivals, but these reforms have been resisted by the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS.
The FLNKS has long said that any change to voting rights must be part of a comprehensive agreement based on a consensus between the French state, independence parties and loyalist parties. These stalled negotiations are being watched impatiently by a younger generation, including many who took to the barricades on 13 May when New Caledonia erupted into five months of violence.
Earlier this year, French president Emmanuel Macron tried to push through a constitutional amendment that would open the way for thousands of new voters to be added to New Caledonia’s electoral rolls. After the French Senate adopted the draft legislation in early 2024, an estimated 25,000 independence supporters rallied peacefully last April calling for the proposed changes to be abandoned.
Macron forged ahead, but when the bill was submitted to the French National Assembly on 13 May, Nouméa exploded. Initial rioting and looting in the capital and surrounding towns expanded to wider clashes between Kanak protestors and the 6000 gendarmes, paramilitary units, riot squads and anti-terrorist police deployed by Paris. Macron’s failed attempt to drive independence leaders to the negotiating table resulted in thirteen deaths, widespread damage to public and private infrastructure in the capital, an economy in crisis and thousands of people — especially French nationals — leaving the country.
After months of ambiguity, the French state has formally abandoned the proposed changes to voting rights. Under new prime minister Michel Barnier, the French government has sent overseas minister François-Noël Buffet and parliamentary leaders to Nouméa in a bid to rebuild confidence and recommence dialogue. The decision to delay the local elections is designed to create time for all parties to forge a consensus on a new political statute. But the vexed question of voting rights remains a central stumbling block. The FLNKS is likely to welcome some more locally born residents as voters as part of a wider agreement, but there is a way to go before a deal is finalised.
Since May 1999, a restricted electorate of New Caledonian voters has gone to the polls every five years to choose the seventy-six members of the Northern, Southern and Loyalty Islands provinces. Fifty-four of the elected members also serve in the national Congress, which can pass laws for those departments that come under the authority of the government of New Caledonia rather than the French state.
The local elections can only be delayed by amending New Caledonia’s 1999 organic law, which implemented the Nouméa Accord. After the French Socialist Party lodged a proposal to postpone this year’s scheduled vote, Paris asked New Caledonia’s Congress for an advisory opinion on the proposed delay.
Visiting Nouméa last month, I watched Congress members debate the issue and, on 22 October, endorse a delay 47–1 (with two abstentions). The vote opened the way for the French parliament to legislate the changes, which passed the Senate on 23 October and the National Assembly on 6 November.
Despite the near-unanimous agreement in Nouméa, the debate revealed significant differences within and between the six parliamentary groups in Congress. Loyalist leader Sonia Backès used her speech to throw out a public challenge to the FLNKS independence movement, and especially its largest member, the Union Calédonienne party, or UC. She criticised last August’s FLNKS Congress decision that agreed “to renew dialogue only with the colonial state, to negotiate the modalities of our accession to sovereignty.”
Addressing UC delegates, Backès asked them “to stop holding bilateral meetings with the French state and to stop only talking about full sovereignty — rather to sit around the table with everyone in order to share their vision and compare it with the vision presented by others.”
FLNKS’s August congress was boycotted by two member parties, the Parti de Libération Kanak, known as Palika, and the Union Progréssiste en Mélanésie, or UPM, both of which are willing to join tripartite talks involving anti-independence parties as well as the French government. “We are in a period of great difficulty, to stabilise [the economy] and rebuild,” Palika’s Jean-Pierre Djaïwé said, “but this future can only be sustainable if — on the horizon — New Caledonians can have the confidence and peace in order to build together.”
In a Congress evenly balanced between supporters and opponents of independence, Eveil Océanien, the party of New Caledonia’s Wallisian and Futunan islanders, has been able to use its three seats to secure representation in New Caledonia’s government and the Congress leadership. Eveil Océanien has one member in the eleven-member government and Veylma Faleolo recently won the presidency of Congress, defeating five-time legislative head and veteran UC politician Roch Wamytan.
Eveil Océanien had opposed the election delay in preliminary congressional discussions. On the Congress floor, however, it switched policy after recognising the “unanimous and unified” decision among other parties. Despite endorsing the delay, the party’s Vaimuʿa Muliava made a long speech to the Congress arguing that “this postponement constitutes a breach of the contract of trust made with voters [at the last elections] in 2019, who elected us for a period of five years.”
Muliava resigned as a government minister in August, returning to his seat in Congress. He lamented the failure to reach a consensus agreement on a political statute to replace the 1998 Nouméa Accord after three referendums in 2018–21.
“All of us,” he said, “including the French state, have failed to find a consensus during these five years, so we must question our collective capacity: do we still have the legitimacy to respond to the aspirations of New Caledonians? When institutions fail, the population must take charge and 13 May highlighted a desire for renewal.”
Calling for agreement on the way forward, Muliava stressed: “If this delay is another lie, the population will remind us of it, perhaps in an even more violent manner than on 13 May. These events forced us to look at the deferral differently. Better a bad deal than a good civil war.”
The only vote against the resolution came from Sylvain Pabouty, leader of Dynamique Unitaire Sud, a pro-independence party based in the Southern province that is part of the UC-FLNKS parliamentary group. His decision to vote No was a personal one, Pabouty said, reflecting his belief that the constant deadline shifts were being driven by Paris rather than the needs of New Caledonians.
“For me, this expresses a balance of power that many New Caledonians, including the Kanak people, have suffered since the third bogus referendum,” he said. “It took thirteen deaths to stop the forced passage [of the constitutional amendment on voting rights]. The postponement of the elections follows this method.”
Many grassroots independence activists wanted the polls to go ahead on schedule rather than wait another year, Pabouty added, citing the August FLNKS Congress’s declaration that “we are ready to go to the provincial elections which are scheduled for no later than 15 December 2024, if political conditions are met.”
The wider UC–FLNKS and Nationalists group nevertheless voted in favour of the delay, without setting out its reasons during the Congress debate. Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, president of the UC–FLNKS group, later told me that his party has different priorities to raise with the Barnier government in Paris.
“For Union Calédonienne, as with the FLNKS, the issue of the provincial elections comes at a lower level than the accession of our nation to full sovereignty,” Tutugoro said. “We have an objective and a trajectory, and to maintain our momentum, our objective — above all others — is to set a date that marks the achievement of this objective. For us, that’s the only way we can work calmly on reconstruction, on the redefinition of New Caledonia’s economic model and to get younger generations involved in these tasks.”
In a press statement after the vote, the Loyalists’ Nicolas Metzdorf, who holds one of two New Caledonian seats in the French National Assembly, welcomed the delay of the polls. “In the current context, this is good news for New Caledonia,” he wrote. “It was unthinkable to imagine organising provincial elections when the restoration of order in New Caledonia is not yet possible, still not complete.”
Metzdorf’s position is somewhat undercut by the fact that the French state has twice held elections — in which many New Caledonians voted — since conflict erupted in mid-May, for the European Parliament (9 June) and the French National Assembly (over two rounds on 30 June and 7 July). These polls went ahead even though New Caledonia was subject to an overnight curfew and faced clashes between Kanak protestors and the thousands of gendarmes and paramilitary units sent from France.
Many business leaders have now welcomed the delay in elections, calling on governments in Paris and Nouméa to focus on economic reconstruction and rebuilding. “We are all trying to survive, so we wouldn’t understand an election now, and we wouldn’t be ready,” David Guyenne, president of New Caledonia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told me. “Even in terms of security, conditions are not right.”
He went on: “I understand from discussions we’ve had with politicians that some of them wanted the legitimacy of a new mandate. But if you hold an election right now, I fear that New Caledonians are not ready to make a clear decision and not an emotional decision — the extremes would come on top and this is not the right moment for that.”
The timing of any changes to voting rights remains a stumbling block. Talks on a new agreement to replace the Nouméa Accord have been stalled for months, but what happens if no agreement can be struck before elections are held in November next year? (Indeed, a deal should really be finalised by March or April to allow the French parliament in Paris to make the necessary legislative changes before voting starts.)
Beyond this, political leaders must persuade their respective constituencies that compromise is required — no easy task given the violence of the past six months, ongoing FLNKS calls for a pathway to independence and the economic fallout from the conflict that will preoccupy many people in coming months. While informal political discussions are going on behind closed doors, the public differences between the contending parties — including disagreements about what can be put on the table during formal negotiations — are significant.
Paris has plenty of other problems, too. After two electoral defeats this year, Macron has cobbled together a government that lacks the majority required to easily pass legislation through the National Assembly. France’s financial crisis means that prime minister Michel Barnier has struggled to finalise a 2025 budget, even as New Caledonia seeks billions of euros in coming years for rebuilding and reconstruction.
On top of all that comes Donald Trump’s election victory, which significantly complicates relations between the United States, France and the European Union: there will be sharp debates next year over funding for NATO and Ukraine. As one politician in Nouméa told me, “We may be a focus for the Barnier government now, but developments in the United States, Ukraine, Gaza or Lebanon may mean New Caledonia will drop further down the list of priorities in Paris.”
In New Caledonia, clashes between protestors and police have ended for now, and independence leaders have welcomed new overtures for dialogue from the French State — but there’s a long way to go. The New Caledonian crisis has largely disappeared from the international media, but today’s calm is fragile.
Independence supporters are waiting to see if Paris will come to any negotiations with a firm proposal that opens the way to a new sovereign political status. If not, New Caledonia may burst into the headlines once again. •
