The Olympics are over, but another contest is gearing up in Paris. French politicians have resumed the task of creating a workable government out of a National Assembly split three ways by the snap election called in June by president Emmanuel Macron.
Tactical voting among Macron’s centre-right Ensemble party and the New Popular Front, or NFP, a leftist alliance, managed to relegate Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally to third place in the second round. But now comes the challenge of forming a government incorporating the high-tax, big-welfare NFP and Ensemble’s fiscal conservatives.
As the biggest grouping, with 182 seats to Ensemble’s 168 in the 577-member parliament, the NFP would normally be invited first to form a government by Macron. But the leader of its largest component, France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is regarded as too red-hot to touch by the president and his party.
Expecting Mélenchon to work with Macron and Ensemble would seem beyond the limits of the “cohabitation” that has previously functioned, albeit uneasily, when the French presidency and the legislature have been held by opposing parties. More moderate figures on the left — Olivier Faure of the Socialists and Marine Tondelier of the Greens — are being talked about as potential PMs, but the seventy-four-year-old Mélenchon, like some other elderly politicians around the world, is refusing to withdraw.
As well as facing many of the problems confronting other advanced economies, the new French government will also have to deal with a crisis on the far side of the world — in New Caledonia, that tiny splinter of Gondwanaland annexed by Paris in 1853 and subjected to the kind of colonial regime pioneered sixty-five years earlier by the British in New South Wales.
The original New Caledonians — Melanesians who came to the Pacific in the great Austronesian canoe migrations between 3000 and 4000 years ago — were nearly wiped out by colonial diseases and massacres. Population numbers rebounded last century, and from the 1970s the local people reasserted their heritage and claims for self-determination under the guidance of a Catholic priest-turned-politician named Jean-Marie Tjibaou.
It was Tjibaou who gave the territory’s tribes a collective name, the Kanak, in ironic tribute to a traditional spirit and the once-pejorative name “Kanaka” given to the Melanesian indentured labourers on sugar cane plantations in Queensland. The Kanak make up about 42 per cent of New Caledonia’s 270,000 people, Europeans another 24 per cent, and the rest of the population identifies with Polynesian and Asian settler communities or claims no ethnic allegiance.
The Kanak awakening of the 1980s led to a near civil war, with Kanaks seizing outlying farms and blockading roads and French-loyalist vigilantes hitting back with murderous ambushes. Tjibaou agreed to put aside independence demands during a long peace-building process but was himself assassinated the next year by a Kanak riled at his compromise.
After nearly two decades of conflict, Kanak and loyalist parties agreed in 1998 on a new twenty-year accord to advance the Kanaks, build a common identity and include Kanak representatives in the territory government. Three referendums on independence would then follow. The first two votes went against independence, but by a narrowing margin. When Macron announced the third in 2021, the Kanaks objected that they were still deep in mourning for numerous victims of Covid and boycotted the vote.
A sweeping majority of those who did vote opposed independence. Macron described it as the final, decisive outcome; the Kanaks thought otherwise.
Macron further raised the temperature in May this year by putting forward legislation to widen the local franchise to anyone resident in the territory for ten years or more, a change Kanaks feared would tip the electoral scales even further against them. When it was approved in Paris by both the National Assembly and the Senate — preparatory to a joint sitting to give it constitutional force — New Caledonia erupted into a new civil war.
Guarded now by 3500 soldiers and police, the territory has returned to a precarious calm interrupted by sporadic arson attacks and blockades. But nine people have died since May, 2343 people have been arrested and a night-time curfew remains. About 700 businesses have been destroyed by arson and looting, according to the Industries Federation of New Caledonia, with total damage put at A$3.55 billion. The nickel-refining industry, like Australia’s, has succumbed to Indonesian competition and tourists are unlikely to return any time soon, leaving the territory’s economy in tatters.
Although Macron’s ministers have called for calm and dialogue, their actions have further inflamed Kanak anger. French authorities arrested five young members of a committee organising protests against the voting changes, charged them with criminal incitement and flew them to France the same day, where they are locked up in widely dispersed jails. The overtones of the nineteenth-century colonial practice of political exile were noted.
Mélenchon, for one, was not impressed. “One hundred and seventy years of relentlessness were not enough to defeat the Kanak will to once again become sovereign over their destiny and no one will ever succeed,” he said when the conflict broke out in May. “There is no way out of a colonial situation than decolonisation, and everything else is a waste of time.” Many of his NFP colleagues would agree.Not only has France’s election result added weight to the decolonisation case, it has also brought another surprise. New Caledonia has two seats in the National Assembly in Paris. One seat, covering the rural areas of the Grande Terre, New Caledonia’s main island, was won by Emmanuel Tjibaou, a son of the assassinated Jean-Marie Tjibaou. As the National Assembly’s first pro-independence member for thirty-eight years and a recognised expert in France on Oceanic cultures, Tjibaou will be a powerful voice for Kanak nationhood. His election overcame a cunning measure taken in 1988 to keep Kanaks out of parliament by adding settler-majority suburbs of Nouméa to the mainly rural island.
The other seat, covering urban Nouméa and the outlying Loyalty Islands, predictably went to a loyalist, Nicolas Metzdorf. But this electorate, weighted to the loyalist camp by the large population of French and other settlers in Nouméa, produced its own surprise. The losing candidate, Omayra Naisseline, the pro-independence daughter-in-law of a renowned independence fighter, won a sizable 48 per cent of the vote. Combined, Tjibaou and Naisseline won 53 per cent of the 156,000 valid votes cast across New Caledonia. And this was from electoral rolls open to all French citizens, unlike the local assembly and referendum rolls restricted to long-term residents under the 1998 agreement. As a former Australian consul-general in Nouméa, Denise Fisher, wrote in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, “These are sobering results for loyalists,”
The question of New Caledonia’s future was not posed directly on the ballot papers. But the result indicates a widening acceptance of independence, or at least of its inevitability in some form. This shift probably originates among members of three groups: Polynesians from the French-held islands scattered to the east who are drawn to a movement called Éveil Océanien (Oceanic Awakening); the roughly 7.5 per cent of the population, thought to mostly be whites, who simply call themselves “Caledonian”; and the “Métros,” younger French working in New Caledonia for a few years to enjoy the Pacific and save their lavish allowances for a place back home. For the Métros, the long-established loyalists are relics of a 1950s France riven by resistance to Algerian independence.
The result opens the possibility that a franchise even wider than Macron’s proposed ten-year residency might actually favour independence, though this would be a big gamble for the Kanak parties. Even without those extra voters, though, the combination of a French left sharing government in Paris, a Kanak voice in the National Assembly and an overall majority for pro-independence candidates in New Caledonia itself has shifted the ground, as has emigration of non-Kanaks spurred by the latest turmoil.
Desperate political battlelines are being drawn by the loyalists in Nouméa. As Nic Maclellan reported recently in Inside Story, one of their most fervent leaders, Sonia Backès, a one-time junior minister under Macron, has called for the territory to be partitioned between the affluent, white-dominated region around Nouméa and the Kanak north of the Grande Terre and Loyalty Islands.
“The Nouméa Accord [of 1998] wanted to impose a fusion or an assimilation. It has only generated an implosion,” Backès said on Bastille Day. “This common destiny has failed… [and] the project of an institutionally united New Caledonia, based on a living together, one with the other, is over and done with.”
Partition has long been part of the French playbook. In the 1970s, the loyalist island of Mayotte was excluded from the newly independent Comoro islands in the Indian Ocean. In the same era, French agencies supported nativist movements on Espiritu Santo and Tanna islands in the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides in their attempts to secede from the emerging state of Vanuatu.
As the implications of the French elections sink in, concern has continued to mount in the region. The Melanesian Spearhead Group — Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea — has proposed a joint mission to New Caledonia with the United Nations, while the wider Pacific Islands Forum, which includes Australia and New Zealand, has just decided to send three of its leaders — Fiji’s Sitiveni Rambuka, Cook Islands’ Mark Brown and Solomon Islands’ Jeremiah Menele — to Nouméa ahead of its annual summit in Tonga on 26 August.
Macron, playing the China card, says a French exit would see Nouméa instantly become a Chinese base. But other independent Pacific states have played off the Chinese against traditional friends without falling into that trap, and Kanak leaders say they would be happy for France to retain defence responsibility.
While China is unlikely to back other separatist movements in West Papua and Bougainville given its own secession concerns, it could happily support decolonisation in the French territories and win acclaim in the region. The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan would be conceding an own-goal to Beijing by backing Macron against any form of independence. •
