IN a chaotic, fast moving situation in Paris, the French government has delayed a scheduled parliamentary debate on New Caledonia for another day.
Debate on proposed constitutional reforms for New Caledonia was supposed to commence on Wednesday but has now been delayed until 11am on Thursday 2 April (9pm Suva time), in an attempt to avoid the looming defeat of the government’s legislation.
With opposition from both Left and extreme-Right parties, the French government is scrambling to salvage the bill that aims to translate New Caledonia’s July 2025 Bougival Accord and January 2026 Elysée-Oudinot Accord into law.
Facing parliamentary defeat, the French government is also discussing alternative ways to salvage its plan to transform New Caledonia into a “State within the French Republic”, replacing the 1998 Noumea Accord with a new political statute entrenched in the French constitution.
Division amongst deputies
Since 2022, parties aligned with French President Emmanuel Macron have lacked a governing majority in the National Assembly. The current government, led by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, has relied on parliamentary manoeuvres to gain the numbers required to pass controversial legislation, including the recent French budget for 2026, pushed through without a vote.
Lecornu previously served as France’s Overseas Minister between 2020 and 2022. He controversially forced through New Caledonia’s third referendum on self-determination in the midst of the Covid pandemic, despite opposition from Kanak customary and political leaders. For many independence supporters, that breach of trust lingers to this day, and has compromised efforts to forge a consensus around a new political statute to replace the Noumea Accord.
The division over the way forward is symbolised by the different positions taken by Nicolas Metzdorf and Emmanuel Tjibaou, New Caledonia’s two deputies in the National Assembly.
Metzdorf, a member of the anti-independence Loyalists party and a supporter of President Macron’s Renaissance group, has urged the French government “to forge ahead with the Bougival process.” He argues that that the majority of parliamentary groups in New Caledonia’s Congress have endorsed the Bougival Accord, despite ongoing opposition from the main independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS).
His counterpart in Paris is Emmanuel Tjibaou, president of the pro-independence party Union Calédonienne (UC), and son of the charismatic Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the co-founder of the FLNKS who was assassinated in 1989.
As a member of the Gauche Démocrate et Républicaine (GDR) parliamentary group in the French legislature, Emmanuel Tjibaou has tabled a motion to reject the draft constitutional bill on New Caledonia, even before the text is fully debated by the National Assembly.
A range of parties across the political spectrum, including the extreme-Right Rassemblement National, the Socialist Party and the Left bloc (La France Insoumise, Ecologists and GDR) have all announced they may vote in favour of Tjibaou’s bill, effectively blocking parliamentary debate on the legislation.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Lecornu and Overseas Minister Naïma Moutchou met with Metzdorf and representative of the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance (UNI), two independence parties that support the bill. In a statement after the meeting, Lecornu said: “It would be unthinkable for this text to be rejected without scrutiny, without any prior debate, and without any substantive discussion. For the sake of democracy, for the people of New Caledonia, and in the public interest: the debate must be opened.”
In response, yesterday’s scheduled debate was deferred at short notice. At time of writing, the president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet has delayed the scheduled start of the parliamentary debate until tonight (Fiji time), but there may be further developments as the government scrambles to avoid an embarrassing defeat in the long-running Bougival process.
This chaotic decision seems to have angered key supporters of the legislation. Philippe Gosselin, a member of the conservative party Les Républicains, is the official rapporteur for the legislation, and prepared a report for all deputies endorsing the bill. As the government delayed the debate, Gosselin said: “We cannot gamble with the future of the territory like this.”
“The situation in New Caledonia is already dire,” he added. “In the Chamber, we have just added further tensions and escalations that are untenable. I call on the government to act responsibly and to take a firm decision on the agenda so that we can move forward.”
The government has been warned
The government’s current scramble to find a way forward comes after many warnings that there is no clear majority to pass the legislation.
Even if debate does proceed, Overseas Minister Moutchou has complained that there are thousands of amendments lodged to the government’s draft legislation. Moutchou – the tenth Overseas Minister to serve under President Macron since his election in 2017 – has failed to implement an agreement first crafted by her predecessor Manual Valls.
In a scathing interview in February, after being dumped from the Lecornu government, former Overseas Minister Valls outlined a series of errors and failed government policies for New Caledonia. Despite his central role in negotiating the Bougival Accord, Valls openly questioned whether the government has the numbers to pass the constitutional: “I’m in favour of Bougival’s success, but I’m realistic about the difficult conditions. I hope that constitutional reform will pass, even though I can count and I have my doubts.”
Another warning came last week. After two days of preliminary review of the legislation, the National Assembly’s Legal Commission rejected the bill. Deputies from the Left-wing bloc and the Rassemblement National successively rejected each clause of the draft legislation. On social media, the Loyalists’ Nicolas Metzdorf criticised the Legal Commission’s decision, calling for a referendum in New Caledonia on the Bougival Accord: “I’m fed up with the National Assembly holding a decision by the people of New Caledonia to ransom.”
In contrast, Emmanuel Tjibaou stressed that “the government must withdraw the bill. If it has no political basis, if it has no constitutional basis, and if it has no legal basis, on what grounds would we put it before the people of New Caledonia?”
Reiterating long-standing FLNKS criticisms of the Bougival and Elysée-Oudinot Accords, Tjibaou said the current legislation undercut key UN decolonisation principles on the right to self-determination. Under Bougival, he said, the transfer of sovereign powers did not mean automatic access to independence and “the French State may decide, or not, on the arrangements for exercising this right, even though it is a right recognised under international law.”
Voting rights contested
In a year of crucial elections for the Pacific – in Fiji, New Zealand and the United States – New Caledonia must also hold elections for its three provincial assemblies and national Congress. The local elections, last held in 2019, have been repeatedly delayed by the French parliament, and are currently scheduled to be held before 28 June, using electoral rolls established under the 1998 Noumea Accord.
This electoral roll for the provincial assemblies – in the North, South and Loyalty Islands – is restricted to New Caledonian citizens, not all resident French nationals. Last September, France’s Constitutional Council reaffirmed that ‘freezing’ the electoral roll to a limited franchise of New Caledonians did not contravene the Constitution.
Despite this, the French government and anti-independence parties want to delay the polls again to late 2026, giving time for the constitutional reform that would allow the expansion of voting rights to more French voters.
This remains a deeply divisive issue. It was the French government’s unilateral attempt to push through changes to voting rights in early 2024 that triggered the riots and clashes that erupted on 13 May that year. Today, New Caledonians live with the catastrophic economic and social consequences of six months of clashes between Kanak protestors and more than 6,000 French security forces, which left 15 dead, hundreds jailed and a shattered economy (New Caledonia’s GDP dropped 13.5% in 2024, and recent attempts to revive key industries like tourism and nickel smelting have been dealt another blow, as global energy costs soar in the aftermath of the US and Israeli aggression against Iran).
Anti-independence parties have long called for the definition of New Caledonian citizenship to be amended to include more residents who cannot currently vote.
To highlight their call to open the electoral rolls to all French voters, the lobby group Un Cœur, une voix held a rally outside the French High Commission on 31 March. Police reported that 2,500 people joined the protest (a far cry from the 10,000-strong rally organised during Prime Minister Lecornu’s last visit to New Caledonia).
This last-minute protest to influence the debate in Paris – endorsed by Les Loyalistes and other conservative leaders – argued that the restrictions on voting rights are a breach of French democratic values. Independence supporters have longer cultural memories however, recalling that for nearly a century after annexation in 1853, indigenous Kanak, indentured labourers and women were not allowed to vote under France’s colonial ‘democracy’.
Yesterday, on social media, Metzdorf added fuel to the fire, arguing that “if the National Assembly rejects the Bougival bill, the government led by @SebLecornu will have two options: 1. A consultation with New Caledonians in the immediate aftermath or 2. An opening of the electoral roll for the provincial elections.”
However Emmanuel Tjibaou warns that is changes are made to voting rights without wider consensus, “that really means we haven’t understood a thing about what happened in May 2024.” He noted that the FLNKS is not opposed to adding extra voters to the rolls (such as New Caledonian-born residents who don’t meet current voting criteria, but stressed “we are opposed to changes only insofar as there is no comprehensive agreement.”
Storms brewing
In Noumea, diverse voices are warning of the danger of further conflict as the Lecornu government forges ahead with the Bougival process.
Laurent Chatenay, a former member of the New Caledonia Congress, wrote an op-ed in the French newspaper Le Monde on Wednesday, highlighting the danger of forcing through changes in the face of opposition from key independence parties.
“The approach adopted by the government is peculiar: rushing the process, imposing tight deadlines, and a lack of mutual consent.” Chatenay wrote. “Yet international law is clear: when the conditions of good faith are no longer met, the legitimacy of a compromise begins to crumble.”
He noted: “In a region where China is stepping up its agreements with island nations and where the United States, Australia and New Zealand are closely monitoring the situation in New Caledonia, an imposed solution would weaken France more than it would stabilise it.”
Speaking at a press conference in Noumea, leaders of the FLNKS called on the government to abandon the legislation. Roch Wamytan, a veteran UC leader and former five-tine Speaker of New Caledonia’s Congress, called for the provincial elections to proceed and stressed: “Everything that is happening right now is the responsibility of the French State.”
In the face of all the parliamentary manoeuvring in Paris, ordinary New Caledonians are bearing the costs of the Lecornu government’s intransigence, even as conservative French media warn the bill is doomed to failure. The social crisis facing New Caledonia is now exacerbated by the likely economic fallout of Israel’s attacks on Iran, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, and the policy chaos that is emanating from the Trump administration in Washington.
In the back of everyone’s mind is the reality that President Macron is running out of time. The next French presidential elections will be held in May 2027, Macron cannot run again, and a number of key figures in the National Assembly are considering whether to throw their hat in the ring. Much of the manoeuvring in Paris is driven by French domestic politics, rather than a deep understanding of New Caledonia and concern for the people living in France’s South Pacific colony.