France has suspended a planned electoral reform in its overseas territory of New Caledonia that sparked civil unrest in the Indo-Pacific archipelago last month, President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday.
Macron said a proposed constitutional amendment announced in May that would have given French citizens who have lived in New Caledonia for more than a decade the right to vote in local elections was being “suspended” to allow a “return to order”.
In reality, however, the dissolution of the French parliament after Macron called a snap election in response to his party’s disappointing result in last week’s EU elections means that reform cannot take place until a new legislature is elected.
Pro-independence movements had already seen the voting reform as dead and buried given Macron’s call for snap elections in the wake of his camp’s European Parliament poll drubbing on Sunday. The Kanak Liberation Party (Palika) said on Wednesday before Macron’s remarks:
We can all agree that the European elections saw off the constitutional bill.
The bill sparked weeks of civil unrest in the South Pacific archipelago, more than 15,000 kilometres from mainland France, which has left at least eight people dead and caused billions of euros in damage.
Many of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak people, who make up about 40 per cent of the territory’s population, have long been unhappy with Parisian rule and oppose granting voting rights to French settlers, believing the move would destroy their hopes for independence.
New Caledonia produces important minerals such as chromium, cobalt, molybdenum, copper, gold and nickel. The export of nickel ore has become one of the main sources of income for the islands. New Caledonia has approximately 10 per cent of the world’s reserves of this metal, the second largest on Earth.
