New Caledonia: deputies decide on the postponement of elections, before constitutional reform

Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: Bertrand Guay /AFP 7:42 a.m., March 18, 2024

The National Assembly decides on Monday on the postponement of the provincial elections in New Caledonia, a prerequisite for the uncertain and much more sensitive constitutional reform which is supposed to review the electorate in the overseas community.

After adoption in the Senate, the deputies are looking at this very brief organic bill which postpones the provincial elections "no later than December 15, 2024", rather than the month of May.

These elections are crucial in New Caledonia where the provinces hold a large part of the powers in the territory.

And this postponement of a few months is the first step, the least sensitive, of the long expected journey to reform the institutions of the archipelago, against a backdrop of negotiations which are slipping with the independence parties.

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“Give local political negotiations a chance to succeed”

The new deadline is "reasonable to give local political negotiations a chance to succeed", according to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.

The government is working on a constitutional reform which promises to be much more tense since the two main Caledonian independence parties are opposed to it at this stage.

It plans to unfreeze the electorate in order to open provincial elections - reserved for natives and residents who arrived before 1998 and their descendants - to people with at least ten years of residence in New Caledonia.

Gérald Darmanin regrets that almost "one in five voters" cannot vote in the local elections currently in New Caledonia, a "freezing of the electorate" which "is not in accordance with the essential principles of democracy, nor with the values of the Republic", he believes.

A decisive congress of the Socialist Kanak Liberation Front (FLNKS), bringing together the main independence movements, is scheduled for March 23, three days before the Senate's examination of this constitutional reform.

In this context, the postponement of the elections is “necessary”.

But "it in no way presumes the outcome of the discussions and could even, if circumstances require it, not be the last", notes the Macronist deputy from New Caledonia Philippe Dunoyer, rapporteur of the bill debated on Monday.