The Pacific archipelago has voted against its independence in a third referendum marked by abstention
“Do you want New Caledonia to access full sovereignty and become independent?” Was the question that the 185,000 people with the right to vote in this archipelago in the South Pacific, located 17,000 kilometers away, had to answer this Sunday. from Paris, 1,500 kilometers from Australia and 1,800 kilometers from New Zealand.
96.49% of New Caledonians who have participated in the referendum have answered “no” to independence. 3.51% voted “yes” and there were 2.99% blank or invalid votes, according to the final results. This was the third referendum organized within the framework of the 1998 Noumea agreement. In 2018, the “no” to independence obtained 56.7% of the votes and in 2020 53.2%.
“New Caledonia will therefore remain French,” French President Emmanuel Macron celebrated in a television statement. “Tonight is France is more beautiful because New Caledonia has chosen to stay in it,” added the French head of state.
The Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) had made a call not to go to vote, because they considered that, with the Covid-19 pandemic, the electoral campaign and the vote could not be held in good conditions. They asked for the vote to be delayed to 2022. But Paris decided to keep the scrutiny.
The participation in this third referendum was 43.90%, half that in the two previous electoral appointments. In 2018, 81.01% of New Caledonians with the right to vote voted and in 2020, 85.89% did.
Paris considers that the low turnout “does not question the validity of the scrutiny,” according to the French overseas ministry. On the other hand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, presidential candidate of La Francia Insumisa (the French Podemos), believes that the result “is not legitimate” because “there was only one ballot because the independentistas had decided not to participate in the referendum.”
The independentista Roch Wamytan considers that “we have returned to the starting box.” «For us it is not the third referendum. We consider that, in terms of legal and political legitimacy, there are only two referendums, that of 2018 and 2020, “said Wamytan in FranceInfo, who hopes to continue discussing this issue with the winner of the French presidential elections next April.
The results of the referendum clearly show that there are still two blocs, independentists and loyalists, in New Caledonia. In this archipelago, 41% of the population is Kanak (indigenous population) and 24% is Caldoche or of European descent. The rest have other origins.
Now, a transitional period opens for the elaboration of a new legal statute for New Caledonia, which will have to be put to a vote. Therefore, this will not be the last referendum in this French overseas territory. New Caledonia, colonized by France in 1853, has been on the UN list of non-autonomous territories pending decolonization since 1986.
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