The fall of French prime minister Michel Barnier has shocked the many New Caledonians still reeling from the economic, cultural and social damage wrought by six months of conflict across the archipelago. The collapse, and the ongoing political uncertainty in Paris, seems likely to delay crucial negotiations on New Caledonia’s future.
Barnier, a long-serving conservative politician and former diplomat, was appointed in September by Emmanuel Macron following the defeat of French president’s Ensemble party and allies in the snap elections for the National Assembly last July. Having refused to appoint a candidate from the left alliance Nouveau Front Populaire, the largest parliamentary group, Macron finally chose a member of the conservative Rassemblement party, which came fourth in the elections.
Given Barnier’s past support for New Caledonia to remain within the French Republic, his appointment was welcomed by anti-independence leaders in the Pacific dependency. Over the last few months, though, business leaders and politicians across Nouméa’s political spectrum have grown increasingly worried by the drift in French leadership.
Since July, political and community leaders in Nouméa have been seeking support from Paris for economic rebuilding and reconstruction. Rioting that began on 13 May led to five months of clashes between indigenous Kanak activists and more than 6000 French gendarmes, riot squads and anti-terrorist police backed by armoured cars and military assistance.
Responding to this crisis was initially high on the Barnier government’s agenda. It quickly abandoned Macron’s failed proposal to change voting rights for New Caledonia’s local elections — the proposed constitutional amendment that triggered the riots in mid-May — and sent a series of dialogue missions to Nouméa led by overseas minister François-Noël Buffet, National Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet and Senate president Gérard Larcher. Overall, Barnier’s government adopted a more conciliatory tone towards the independence movement, seeking to restart negotiations on New Caledonia’s future political status.
The New Caledonia government’s key priority, meanwhile, was securing finance for employment and investment. Months of conflict had damaged local businesses, tourism and the crucial nickel industry; one in six workers in the private sector had lost their jobs; and many others were surviving on reduced hours. Under president Louis Mapou, the government in Nouméa adopted a plan to stabilise the economy, transform the tax base and support workers and employers battered by months of shutdown and conflict. But it needed support from Paris to finance the transition over the next three years under a plan dubbed PS2R.
Since Barnier’s appointment New Caledonian business and political leaders have travelled to Paris to lobby for the extra funding, and President Mapou met his French counterpart at the Élysée Palace in November. After weeks of parliamentary negotiations in Paris, though, Barnier failed to finalise a national budget for 2025. Trapped between the Nouveau Front Populaire and the extreme right Rassemblement national, the unseasoned PM lacked the necessary political authority.
Barnier’s decision to through ram changes to social security funding without a parliamentary vote was the final straw. On 4 December, 331 of 577 National Assembly deputies voted in favour of a no-confidence motion initiated by Nouveau Front Populaire and backed by Rassemblement National, bringing down the government.
Unlike most Assembly members from France’s Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies, New Caledonia’s two deputies were wary of the motion. “We need to have a functioning government to discuss the future of New Caledonia and we need to have economic and financial stability and support from the French State,” said loyalist politician Nicolas Metzdorf. Absent from parliament for the vote, New Caledonia’s other deputy Emmanuel Tjibaou was one of the few members of the left who declined to back Barnier’s ousting.
Tjibaou, the first pro-independence Kanak leader to serve in the National Assembly for thirty-eight years, is the newly elected president of the largest pro-independence party, Union Calédonienne, or UC. Unlike his conservative colleague Metzdorf, he continues to call for a pathway to sovereign independence. Both, however, have been working to gain extra economic assistance for New Caledonia in preparation for planned discussions on a new political statute in 2025. As Tjibaou recently said, “You can’t negotiate on an empty stomach.”
The two New Caledonian parliamentarians have been successful in gaining pledges of extra support from Paris in recent weeks. The Barnier government committed financial assistance until the end of 2024 and included important New Caledonia–focused measures in the draft budget for 2025. Just before the no-confidence motion, the National Assembly also passed a bill to continue funding for the 2024 financial year, including important commitments made by France’s overseas minister during his October visit to Nouméa. These included additional loan guarantees; funding to rebuild schools, town halls and other public buildings damaged by arson or rioting since May; and financial subsidies to employers to retain workers who have lost full-time jobs.
But this week’s no-confidence motion — the first in more than sixty years — blows the draft 2025 budget out of the water. Barnier has formally resigned, with the dubious distinction that his ninety-day tenure was the shortest prime ministership since the French Fifth Republic was created in 1958.
Before the vote on 4 December, overseas minister François-Noël Buffet acknowledged that the government had failed to lock in its pledges to New Caledonia. “We are in an extremely difficult situation,” he said. “The government had made commitments at the time of my visit to New Caledonia and they had to be translated into concrete terms in the budget.”
The French parliament had recently deferred local elections in New Caledonia until November 2025, leaving the Mapou government in office until New Caledonian citizens can again vote for their three provincial assemblies and national congress. The year-long delay was partly designed to give time for supporters and opponents of independence to negotiate a new political statute to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord.
For Loyalist leader Nicolas Metzdorf, the no-confidence motion “plunges France into a major political crisis at a time when New Caledonia needs stability more than ever. This vote, with serious consequences, comes while significant progress had been obtained within the framework of the finance bill for 2025.”
On 11 December, the New Caledonia congress must now vote on legislation that would validate the loans and grants committed for 2024, worth twenty-seven billion Pacific francs (A$350 million). Beyond this, prospects for next year are still uncertain.
Emmanuel Macron still has two years in office before the next presidential elections in 2027, but his capacity to drive politics and policy is diminished. Even as he struts the world stage, he is on the nose with most French voters. One recent poll found that 63 per cent of French citizens want him to quit after the successful no-confidence motion.
Returning to Paris from a diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia, the president was defiant: “If I am here before you, it is because I was elected twice by the French people. I am extremely proud of this and I will honour this trust with all the energy that is mine, until the last second I can be useful to the country.”
Widely seen as arrogant and out of touch, the French president has been criticised by his own supporters for last June’s decision to hold snap elections, which left his parliamentary group without the numbers to pass legislation. As Le Monde noted this week, “Macron is still paying for, and making the country pay for, his disastrous dissolution of the National Assembly in June, which resulted in no governing majority, three political blocs unable to agree, and the feeling amongst many voters that they had been democratically cheated during the interminable appointment of Prime Minister Barnier.”
“There is now a real risk that the political crisis will degenerate into an institutional crisis,” the leading newspaper added, “given the high level of mistrust not only of the President but also of parliamentarians.”
Macron’s misjudgement echoes a series of policy blunders in recent years that have affected people in New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia, even as small island states try to deal with post-Covid debt, cost-of-living pressure, the climate emergency and growing US–China strategic competition.
At the Pacific Islands Forum in Nuku’alofa in September, French Polynesian president Moetai Brotherson told me that decisions taken by Macron since 2021 had contributed to mid-May’s explosion of conflict in New Caledonia. “Unfortunately, all the events since 13 May were easy to foresee,” he said. “I’ve been telling France for three years now about the stepping stones that led to those events.”
First of all, he went on, “the decision by the French State to maintain the third referendum on self-determination in December 2021, that was the first mistake. Then the nomination of [loyalist leader] Madame Backès as secretary of state for citizenship — that was a huge mistake, because it was the first time that the French State was clearly no longer respecting the neutral position that was their position since the [1998 Noumea] Accord.”
Brotherson noted that President Macron’s attempt to ram through electoral reforms for New Caledonia earlier this year added to the breakdown of trust between independence supporters and the French State: “The third and major mistake was this push around modification of the voting constituency in New Caledonia, and that was a major mistake, especially in the light of dissolving the French National Assembly right after creating all this havoc.”
So what comes next? Barnier will remain as caretaker leader until Macron can appoint a successor (who will become the sixth prime minister the French leader has churned through since his election in 2017). Macron may now seek to split the left’s Nouveau Front Populaire by offering the prime minister’s job to a politician from the Socialist Party or Greens while isolating the fiery Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. But whoever takes up this poisoned chalice will still not have a governing majority in the parliament.
New parliamentary elections aren’t an option for Macron until July next year (the law requires him to wait a year after June’s snap elections before dissolving the legislature again).
When Barnier first took office three months ago, a Le Monde editorial on New Caledonia declared that “France has a duty there to achieve what it has so often failed to do in the past: decolonisation.” That remains the challenge for France’s next prime minister (and neighbouring countries in Oceania, including Australia). Many independence supporters will be reaffirmed in their belief that it’s time to depart the French colonial empire as an independent nation. •
