What are you doing for New Year’s Eve? For Elisabeth Borne, the evening is perfect. The Prime Minister is flying this Sunday to Guyana where she will spend New Year’s Eve with the armed forces who are fighting in particular against illegal gold mining, far from the rumors of reshuffle and the political turmoil caused by the law on immigration. She will also stay there on January 1 and will start the year 2024 on a canoe to visit a river checkpoint and a Native American village.
This is the first time that she is going to this department of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of South America, bordering Suriname and Brazil which, like the Mayotte archipelago which she visited at the mid-December, 60% voted for Marine Le Pen in the last presidential election.
“The feeling of accomplishment” in 2023
It is from Guyana that Elisabeth Borne will attend Emmanuel Macron’s wishes on December 31, while the head of state promised a “new course” for 2024, fueling speculation around a possible government reshuffle , or even a change of Prime Minister.
The head of government explained that she had “the feeling of duty accomplished” after the adoption of the immigration law voted by the deputies of the Republicans (LR) and those of the National Rally (RN), which provoked strong criticism on the left and fractured the majority, a quarter of the Renaissance deputies not having voted for the text.
2,200 soldiers in Guyana
Some 2,200 soldiers and around a thousand gendarmes are stationed in Guyana, engaged in particular in the fight against illegal fishing and illegal gold miners (gold prospectors) as well as in securing the Guyanese space center of Kourou (north). The French army was bereaved twice in this territory this year during missions to combat illegal gold mining.
The head of government, who will be accompanied by the Secretary of State for Youth and Universal National Service, Prisca Thevenot, will also visit a site often affected in Dorlin, where the forces of the 9th RIMa (infantry regiment) operate in particular. of navy).
It was there that on March 25, a GIGN major, Arnaud Blanc, 35, was killed while he participated with nine comrades in an operation against these clandestine gold prospectors. At the beginning of May, a canoeist member of the Armed Forces of Guyana (FAG) died in a canoe accident during a night operation on the Oyapock River (east).