In the ongoing blame game, it’s hard not to point to Macron himself as the arsonist in chief. He’s the one who set in motion a vote in Paris that triggered the protests in New Caledonia.
When, in the small hours of Thursday, a bleary-eyed Emmanuel Macron emerged from 25 hours in the presidential plane flying from Paris to Nouméa, riots and looting had been raging for more than a week around the capital of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, with six dead, including two gendarmes., may not have been the most tactful.
He then dismissed weeks of protest marches from Kanak citizens, the indigenous population of New Caledonia, remote as they were from the fulcrum of politics in the capital, 17,000 kilometres away. Last week, the marches turned violent.Macron was not yet 11 years old in 1988 when, after several years of rising violence, including a bloody hostage-taking, François Mitterrand’s then PM Michel Rocard hammered out accords that brought peace back to the islands, initiating a 10-year-long process.
Paris’s answers have been characteristic of Macron’s top-down style. Instead of asking one of the few experienced French officials that the locals value, the 69-year-old former high commissioner Thierry Lataste, he was accompanied on his trip by a clone-like trio of 40-something technocrats guaranteed not to contradict him.
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