by Nic Maclellan
A no-confidence motion in the French National Assembly has ousted the government led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier. But for New Caledonians, still reeling from the economic, cultural and social impacts of six months of conflict this year, the collapse of the Barnier government raises concern about future support from Paris.
A long-serving conservative politician and former diplomat, Barnier was appointed as a Prime Minister in September by French President Emmanuel Macron, following the defeat of the presidential majority in July’s snap elections for the National Assembly. From months, Macron had delayed appointing a prime minister, given his Ensemble alliance lacked the numbers to maintain a governing majority in the French legislature.
Refusing to appoint a candidate from the Left-wing political alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) – even though it was the largest parliamentary group – Macron finally chose Barnier to lead the government, even though he was a member of the conservative Rassemblement party, which came fourth in the elections!
At the time, Barnier’s appointment was welcomed by New Caledonian anti-independence parties, given his past support for the Pacific dependency to remain within the French Republic. Over the last few months, however, business leaders and politicians across the political spectrum in Noumea have been increasingly worried by the drift in French leadership.
Since July, political and community leaders in Noumea have sought support from Paris for post-conflict reconstruction, after riots erupted on 13 May, followed by five months of clashes between Kanak activists and more than 6,000 French gendarmes, riot squads and anti-terrorist police, backed by armoured cars and military assistance.
Initially, responding to the crisis was high on the Barnier government’s agenda. It formally abandoned Macron’s failed policy on electoral reform for New Caledonia’s local legislature (a constitutional amendment that triggered the riots in mid-May). Barnier deployed a series of diplomatic missions to Noumea, including Overseas Minister François-Noël Buffet, the president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and Senate president Gérard Larcher. His government adopted a more conciliatory tone towards the independence movement, seeking to re-start stalled negotiations on New Caledonia’s future political status.
For the Government of New Caledonia, however, a central priority was to negotiate new funding in the French government’s 2025 budget to support economic reconstruction. The months of conflict had damaged local businesses, the tourism sector and the crucial nickel industry; one in six workers in the private sector have lost their jobs and many others survive on reduced hours. Under President Louis Mapou, New Caledonia’s government adopted a plan to stabilise the economy, transform the tax base, and support workers and employers battered by months of shutdown and conflict – but needed support from Paris to finance the transition over the next three years.
Since Barnier took office, New Caledonian business and political leaders have travelled to Paris to lobby French politicians for extra funding in the 2025 national budget. President Mapou also flew to Paris in November, meeting with President Macron at the Elysee Palace to call for urgent action.
However, after weeks of negotiations, Barnier couldn’t finalise a national budget for 2025. In office for only three months, Barnier’s government lacked the numbers to easily pass legislation. Trapped between the largest bloc in the National Assembly, the Left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire and the extreme right Rassemblement national, Barnier lacked the political authority to bang heads together.
His decision to ram through changes to Social Security funding without a vote in the National Assembly was the final straw. On 4 December, a no confidence motion proposed by the NFP was backed by Rassemblement national, and 331 of 577 deputies in the National Assembly voted to bring down the government.
Unlike most parliamentarians from France’s overseas colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, New Caledonia’s two deputies in the National Assembly did not vote in favour of the no-confidence motion.
Loyalist politician Nicolas Metzdorf is a member of Macron’s presidential bloc, and voted against the resolution. Speaking in Paris after the vote, Metzdorf said “we need to have a functioning government to discuss the future of New Caledonia and we need to have economic and financial stability and support from the French State.”
The other New Caledonian member of the French legislature is Emmanuel Tjibaou, newly elected as president of the largest pro-independence party Union Calédonienne (UC). Winning his seat in Paris last July, Tjibaou is the first pro-independence Kanak leader to serve in the National Assembly for 38 years. However, on Wednesday he was absent during the no-confidence vote, one of the few members of the Left who declined to vote for Barnier’s ousting.
As UC president, Tjibaou continues to call for a pathway to sovereign independence. However, like his conservative colleague Metzdorf, Tjibaou has been working to gain extra economic assistance for New Caledonia, in preparation for planned discussions on a new political statute in 2025 (as he recently said “you can’t negotiate on an empty stomach”).
In recent weeks, the New Caledonian parliamentarians have been successful in gaining pledges of extra support from Paris. The Barnier government committed financial assistance until the end of 2024 and included important provisions just for New Caledonia in the draft budget for 2025. Just before the no-confidence motion, the National Assembly passed a bill to continue funding for the 2024 financial year, including important commitments made by France’s Overseas Minister during his October visit to Noumea (additional loan guarantees; funding to rebuild schools, town halls and other public buildings damaged by arson or rioting over the last six months; financial subsidies to employers to retain workers who have lost full-time jobs).
However this month’s parliamentary no-confidence motion – the first in more than 60 years – blows the draft 2025 budget out of the water. Barnier has now formally resigned, with the dubious distinction that his 90-day tenure was the shortest period as prime minister since the French Fifth Republic was created in 1958.
Funding for New Caledonia
Before the vote on 4 December, Overseas Minister François-Noël Buffet acknowledged that the government had failed to lock in its pledges to New Caledonia.
“We are in an extremely difficult situation,” he said. “The government had made commitments at the time of my visit to New Caledonia [last October] and they had to be translated into concrete terms in the budget.”
In a statement, Buffet outlined the provisions that would lapse if the government lost office. The draft financial program for next year included: a loan guarantee of 1 billion euros to underwrite budgetary initiatives by the Government of New Caledonia; plans for tax incentives to encourage post-conflict investment in the islands; and legislation and funding to conduct a census next year (New Caledonia’s five-yearly census was last held in 2019 and was due this year, but could not proceed during the months of turmoil since May).
Last month, the French Parliament deferred local elections in New Caledonia until November 2025, leaving the Mapou government in office until New Caledonian citizens can again vote for their three provincial assemblies and national Congress. The year-long delay is designed to give time for supporters and opponents of independence to negotiate a new political statute to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord. Now, the collapse of the French government and ongoing political uncertainty in Paris may delay the timing of crucial negotiations on New Caledonia’s future.
For Loyalist leader Nicolas Metzdorf, the no-confidence motion “plunges France into a major political crisis at a time when New Caledonia needs stability more than ever. This vote, with serious consequences, comes while significant progress had been obtained within the framework of the finance bill for 2025.”
On 11 December, the Congress of New Caledonia must now vote on legislation that would validate the loans and grants committed for 2024 worth 27 billion Pacific francs (A$350 million). Beyond this, prospects for next year are still uncertain.
Macron’s folly
On the night after the collapse of the Barnier government, French President Emmanuel Macron made a televised speech to the nation, pledging to appoint a new prime minister quickly. However he showed no humility or acknowledgement of his own responsibility for the current crisis. Instead he thrust responsibility back to the parliament, suggesting they must finalise a new budget before Christmas: “It is necessary to have this budget at the very beginning of next year to allow the country to invest, as has been planned, in our armed forces, our court system, our law enforcement, but also to help our farmers in difficulty who were waiting for the budget, or to support New Caledonia.”
Macron still has two years in office until the next presidential elections in 2027, but his capacity to drive politics and policy is diminished. Even as he struts the world stage as a statesman, he is on the nose with most French voters – one opinion poll taken after the no-confidence motion reported that 63% of French citizens want him to resign.
The New Popular Front has called for Macron’s resignation, but – returning to Paris from a diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia – Macron was defiant: “If I am here before you, it is because I was elected twice by the French people. I am extremely proud of this and I will honour this trust with all the energy that is mine, until the last second I can be useful to the country.”
His political future remains uncertain however, given that many of the key players in the National Assembly also intend to run for the presidency in 2027, including Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement national (National Rally), Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (France unbowed) and even Macron allies like Edouard Philippe, a former Prime Minister dumped in the 2021, or outgoing Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
Widely seen as arrogant or out of touch, the French President has been criticised by his own supporters for last June’s decision to call snap elections, which left his parliamentary group without the numbers to pass legislation. After the collapse of the Barnier government, an editorial in Le Monde noted that “Macron is still paying for, and making the country pay for, his disastrous dissolution of the National Assembly in June, which resulted in no governing majority, three political blocs unable to agree, and the feeling amongst many voters that they had been democratically cheated during the interminable appointment of Prime Minister Barnier.”
The leading newspaper argued “there is now a real risk that the political crisis will degenerate into an institutional crisis, given the high level of mistrust not only of the President but also of parliamentarians.”
Macron’s misjudgement on domestic French politics echoes a series of policy blunders in recent years that have affected people in New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia, even as the small island states try to deal with post-Covid debt, cost-of-living pressure, the climate emergency and growing US-China strategic competition.
At the Pacific Islands Forum in Nuku’alofa last August, President of French Polynesia Moetai Brotherson told Islands Business that misjudged decisions taken by President Macron since 2021 had contributed to mid-May’s explosion of conflict in New Caledonia.
“Unfortunately, all the events since 13 May were easy to foresee,” Brotherson said. “I’ve been telling France for three years now about the stepping stones that led to those events.”
“First of all, the decision by the French State to maintain the third referendum on self-determination in December 2021, that was the first mistake. Then the nomination of [Loyalist leader] Madame Backès as Secretary of State for Citizenship – that was a huge mistake, because it was the first time that the French State was clearly no longer respecting the neutral position that was their position since the [1998 Noumea] Accord.”
Brotherson noted that President Macron’s attempt to ram through electoral reforms for New Caledonia – without a local consensus – added to this breakdown of trust between independence supporters and the French State: “The third and major mistake was this push around modification of the voting constituency in New Caledonia, and that was a major mistake, especially in the light of dissolving the French National Assembly right after creating all this havoc!”
So what comes next? Michel Barnier will remain as caretaker leader until President Macron can appoint a successor (who will become the sixth prime minister the French leader has churned through since his re-election in 2017). Macron may now seek to split the Left’s New Popular Front, offering the prime minister’s job to a politician from the Socialist Party or Greens, while isolating Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. However whoever takes up this poisoned chalice will not have a governing majority in the parliament, Macron cannot call new parliamentary elections until July 2025 (after calling snap elections last June, the law requires him to wait a year before he can dissolve the legislature again).
When Barnier first took office three months ago, a Le Monde editorial on New Caledonia said that “France has a duty there to achieve what it has so often failed to do in the past: decolonisation.”
That remains the challenge for France’s next Prime Minister. Many independence supporters will be reaffirmed in their belief that it’s time to move on from the French colonial empire, as an independent nation.