Corsican elected officials resume discussions with Paris on the island’s institutional future
The slideshow sequence has limitations. This is what the Corsican nationalists indicated to the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, on Wednesday June 7, on the occasion of the fourth meeting of the strategic committee devoted to the evolution of the institutional status of the island. Open since July 2022 following the uprising of island youth after the deadly attack on Yvan Colonna on March 2, discussions between Corsican representatives and the government are continuing but the tone is hardening. Although, as confided to the World the nationalist mayor of Porto-Vecchio (Corse-du-Sud), Jean-Christophe Angelini, “the session began in tension and ended at the end of the day in peace”.
“We don’t go to Paris to watch slides”, annoys most of the Corsican representatives. Reference to the conduct of the first three meetings punctuated by the examination of comparison tables between different statuses of French and foreign island territories (in the Mediterranean and overseas), slide projection in support. Wednesday morning, in his opening remarks – “a bit dry”, according to a participant -, the president of the Corsican executive, Gilles Simeoni, attacked the method of a process that he considers winded. “They are doing everything to prevent it from progressing”, he had already lamented in February.
The fact is that with only four meetings in the last ten months, we are far from the rhythm of a meeting every six weeks promised in September 2022. Adjournments and postponements have followed one another, sometimes due to tensions on the island , sometimes with regard to a ministerial schedule jostled by unforeseen events. “The minister is not master of his agenda subject to a news that we do not control”we apologize place Beauvau.
A debate “without taboo”
Mr. Darmanin underlined that he kept his promises of a debate ” without taboo “ at the end of which he expects proposals that he would send to the President of the Republic before July 14, according to a timetable that the latter had announced on February 24 during the previous meeting. He also recalled that he was the first to have raised the question of autonomy without rejecting it a priori and to have kept his commitments on the fate of those convicted for the assassination of the prefect Erignac.
What autonomy for Corsica? The minister assures him: all the solutions envisaged will be examined by Emmanuel Macron but, for the time being, he still does not know what the nationalists are putting behind this term.
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