After seven days of visit, Gérald Darmanin left New Caledonia on Sunday on the promise of new peaceful exchanges with the separatists, but the timetable for discussions on the status of the territory remains to be defined. The mission of the Minister of the Interior and Overseas was difficult: to reconnect with the supporters of the independence of the territory of the South Pacific, while sparing the loyalist camp favorable to the maintenance of French sovereignty.
For more than a year, dialogue had been broken with the Kanak Socialist Liberation Front (FLNKS), which unites a good part of the separatists. The movement had notably shunned a meeting scheduled for October in Paris to define the terms of the discussions on the future status of the territory. Three referendums rejected independence, but the legitimacy of the last one, organized in December 2021 in the midst of the Covid epidemic, was strongly contested by the FLNKS.
Darmanin in no hurry
All week, Gérald Darmanin has therefore multiplied contacts with the separatists to convince them to return to the discussion table. Goal achieved. If the vice-president of the Caledonian Union (UC), the main component of the FLNKS, Gilbert Tyuiénon, repeated to the minister “the humiliation for the Kanak people” that the maintenance of the referendum of December 12 had constituted, he confided to have been “pleasantly surprised” by their exchanges.
Gérald Darmanin thus accepted the independence proposal for bilateral meetings in February 2023, after the FLNKS congress. “I will not speed up the pace, he promised Friday during an interview with local media. It is in a few weeks, I believe that peace is well worth waiting a few weeks”. A gesture appreciated by separatists on two counts. Firstly because the FLNKS congress must allow them to speak with one voice against the state. Then because the bilateral meetings, in particular on decolonization and the right to self-determination, de facto sign the postponement of negotiations on the future status of the territory.
The loyalist camp, however, wanted to go faster, to arrive at a referendum on the new status from 2023. The supporters of maintaining New Caledonia in France have nevertheless come to terms with it. “We have a minister who listens, a minister who tries to understand,” said Renaissance MP Nicolas Metzdorf. Gérald Darmanin took advantage of his visit to install one of the eight working groups validated in October in Paris, that on land. That on the institutional future has been postponed but that on the nickel sector, vital for the economy of New Caledonia, will begin in Paris in the coming weeks, without the Caledonian Union (UC) however.