Security, employment, the post-Covid-19 crisis, the presidential election… The executive will have a long list of topics to discuss this Wednesday with elected officials from overseas. About fifty elected officials from the communities of the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean were invited by President Emmanuel Macron to “a working dinner”.
The objective of this meeting is to have “a discussion on important subjects for our fellow citizens: security, employment, high cost of living, infrastructure”, specified the Elysée this Wednesday morning, during a point press, to find solutions to the specific problems of these overseas French people.
The elected representatives of the Pacific reunited later
The parliamentarians, the presidents of the executives, the presidents of the associations of mayors and the European deputies of the Réunion of Mayotte, Guyana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin, Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon will be received by Emmanuel Macron in the presence of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, members of the government, and all the overseas prefects with the aim of “sharing diagnoses and proposing solutions”.
Elected officials from Pacific communities, which are governed by different rules, will be received at a separate working meeting, said the Élysée. According to INSEE, extreme poverty is 5 to 15 times more frequent in the overseas departments (DOM) than in metropolitan France. It is also much more intense there.
“The President of the Republic wanted to bring elected officials together to have a direct exchange after the Covid period and after the elections, then to also meet the expectations of the elected officials who had spoken”, according to the Elysée. During his campaign, Emmanuel Macron had struggled to convince these territories which had voted in the majority for Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. In addition, his previous five-year term had been marred by sometimes violent demonstrations against the government’s vaccination policy, against a backdrop of social and economic crisis.
A “deep change of policy”
Before this dinner, Emmanuel Macron will receive the signatories of the “call from Fort de France” (the presidents of the regions of Guadeloupe, Réunion, Mayotte, Martinique, Saint-Martin and Guyana), who had asked to meet the head of the state to discuss “a profound change in policy” to aid the development of their poverty-stricken territories.
For them, this requires the combination of “full equality of rights” with the recognition of their “specificities”, in particular by a “real domiciliation of the decision-making levers as close as possible to (their) territories”. The goal of the Head of State is “to work with elected officials so that public action, that carried out by the State, that carried out by the communities, is more effective, is reinforced”, underlined the Elysée.
The president of the executive council of the territorial community of Martinique Serge Letchimy said he was waiting for “an agenda for the development of institutions” as well as a “development framework” on Tuesday.
The statutory question?
President Macron, “in the weeks that follow, will ask the government for a roadmap that will allow it to strengthen its action”, assured the Elysée, recalling that the “master words” of State action are “the differentiation and empowerment. During his previous mandate, the Head of State had placed his Overseas action on the principle of “shared responsibility” during the restitution of the foundations of the Overseas Territories which gave rise to the publication of the Blue Book.
The priority of fellow citizens is on everyday subjects, according to the Élysée, but “if it comes down to making organizational, regulatory, legislative changes, we are open to it, that is the objective of these exchanges. And it can go further on the statutory, the president had said very clearly ” no taboo ”, but (this type of development) goes through the consultations of the populations ”.
The former Minister of Overseas, Sébastien Lecornu, had addressed the question of autonomy during a trip to Guadeloupe on the occasion of the urban riots which had shaken the island in November 2021. For the senator (RDPI ) of Guyana Marie-Laure Phinéra-Horth, this dinner will indeed be an opportunity “to continue negotiations” on autonomy. “Martinique and Guyana will talk about it,” she explains.
“I am for autonomy of the territory but, before that, we also have to settle things. It will be up to us, elected officials, to work together to move towards more autonomy, to be able to make lasting decisions that correspond to our realities”, indicates the elected official who is counting on the unitary approach in the wake of the call from Fort -de-France to “lay the foundations with the government”. “We have to be united in front of the government and show that we want it”.