A new visit to the Island of Beauty. According to Gérald Darmanin’s entourage, the Minister of the Interior will visit Corsica on September 13 and 14. He will participate in the General Assembly of Mayors of the island, said relatives of the minister to Agence-France Presse, thus confirming information from the regional daily Corse-Matin. The purpose of this visit is “to exchange with the president of the executive Gilles Simeoni and to meet the mayors of the island”, adds the entourage of the tenant of Beauvau.
This trip should also make it possible to bring the positions of the island’s elected officials closer, between the proponents of autonomy and those who plead for an adaptation of the laws to Corsican specificities. It intervenes when the Assembly of Corsica failed, at the beginning of July, to agree on a project of autonomy. At the end of two days of extraordinary session, the elected islanders had transmitted to the government and to President Emmanuel Macron two projects, one of the quasi-united nationalists and the other of the right-wing opposition.
At the end of February, during the resumption of discussions on the institutional future of the island, which had been stopped for six months, Emmanuel Macron had repeated that he was ready to include possible developments in his constitutional reform project, at the expense of the Corsican elected officials and the Ministry of the Interior to present “a proposal (…) before July 14”. He also recalled two red lines: maintaining Corsica in the Republic and refusing to create two categories of citizens.
The text of the nationalists calls for the “legal recognition of the Corsican people”, “a status of co-officiality of the Corsican language” and the recognition of the “link between the Corsican people and their land” via “a resident status”. He wants the political agreement reached to be submitted to a referendum in Corsica and appear in the form of a “title in the Constitution enshrining autonomy”.
In fact, this text takes up the main lines of Gilles Simeoni’s report. The latter exposed his vision of autonomy for Corsica, namely that of a legislative power in all areas for the Assembly of Corsica, except those relating to sovereign areas.
The second text, from the right-wing opposition, calls for a simple “power to adapt” French laws to Corsican specificities, without autonomous management of education and health and without transfer of taxation.