The government is “awaiting proposals on the institutional future” of Corsica from “the nationalist majority” on the island, said Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on Sunday, after a lunch with Gilles Simeoni, the president of the Corsican executive council.
“We discussed the institutional future of the island, which the nationalist majority wanted to be called autonomy”, explained the minister, at the end of a lunch with the autonomist president of the Corsican executive in Corte. (Haute-Corse): “And we are awaiting proposals (…) from Gilles Simeoni and his majority”.
A meeting in Paris between elected Corsica and the State
“Because I repeat, it is not the French state that wants autonomy but the majority today of the executive council (Corsica)”, insisted Gérald Darmanin, on the second day of a visit to Corsica that began Saturday in Calvi, recalling that the Corsican elected officials and the government were going to meet for a meeting on this file on Friday in Paris.
Sunday morning, at the town hall of Corte, Gilles Simeoni had greeted the “state of mind” of the minister, seeing it as a “happy omen of the work and the appointments which await us and which will allow us to drive together Corsica towards a path that will be that of peace, emancipation and development, within the framework of a peaceful relationship”.
“We have important discussions (…), an important meeting will be held (Friday) in Paris”, had already underlined Gérald Darmanin on Saturday, in reference to his invitation launched to Gilles Simeoni and Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, the autonomist president of the Assembly of Corsica, to resume discussions on the future of the island. These discussions were interrupted in the fall due to tensions around the last members still in prison of the commando responsible for the assassination of the prefect Erignac in 1998 in Ajaccio.
The minister went to the Isle of Beauty last August, after the catastrophic storms that killed five people there, and in early February, for the 25th anniversary of the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac.
But since July and the launch of a cycle of consultations on the future of the island, the Minister of the Interior had no longer made any “political” visit to Corsica. He had canceled his visits planned for October and December, in the face of the strong tensions born around the umpteenth refusal of justice to grant a semi-freedom regime to Alain Ferrandi and Pierre Alessandri, sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of Claude Erignac but releasable since 2017.