While the President of the Republic said, Thursday, September 28, that he was in favor of recognizing the specificity of Corsica in the French Constitution, his remarks were immediately welcomed by the regional presidents. In particular Loig Chesnais-Girard, who demanded “the same thing” for Brittany, of which he has been regional president since 2017, in order to free itself from “outmoded centralism”.
“I hear that the President of the Republic is talking about more freedom, autonomy for Corsica, to act in important areas like housing, languages ??or other subjects, well we are asking the same thing,” he said during a press point at the closing of the Congress of the Regions of France, organized this year in Saint-Malo.
“There are not mature and responsible elected officials on the one hand, who can have the rights to act on a daily basis for their inhabitants, and other elected officials who will remain in a backward-looking centralism,” insisted Mr. Chesnais -Girard. The latter took advantage of the arrival of the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, to submit a report detailing his wishes for “stronger decentralization”.
A “beneficial opening” for other regions and territories
Speaking in Ajaccio before the assembly of Corsica, controlled by the nationalists, Emmanuel Macron declared Thursday morning: “We must move forward, and for that we need the entry of Corsica into our Constitution (…) Let us have the audacity to build autonomy for Corsica in the Republic”. However, he stressed that “it will not be autonomy against the State, nor autonomy without the State”.
Concretely, the Head of State gave “six months” to Corsican political groups, from separatists to the right, to reach an “agreement” with the government leading to a “constitutional and organic text” making it possible to modify the status of the island, a text which can then be presented in Paris. The wait was immense on the Isle of Beauty, led by the nationalists for eight years.
In Saint-Malo, the socialist president of the Occitanie region, Carole Delga, said she welcomed “rather positively but cautiously” this “openness” from the head of state, who has until now remained “fairly hermetic on the issue”. “I am certain that this opening for Corsica will also be beneficial for the overseas territories, Brittany or other regions,” she added.
For its part, the Basque nationalist party EH Bai welcomed in a tweet a “historic declaration [from the President of the Republic which] must be accompanied by real institutional progress for Corsica”. “In the Basque Country too, we are calling for a broad agreement which will allow us to make our wish for institutional development heard by the French State,” he added.
