Emmanuel Macron arrived in Corsica on Wednesday evening where he immediately joined local elected officials to try to agree on a common position before his highly anticipated speech on Thursday on possible autonomy for the island.
“I will first listen to all the political leaders, the elected officials. We will work and we will move forward,” he declared, accompanied by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, during a crowd bath in front of the Ajaccio prefecture just before a dinner with the main players on the island.
At the end of these final discussions, cautious optimism reigned in the ranks of the nationalist guests, according to whom President Macron spoke of “a model” of autonomy “to be invented”, without mentioning his red lines and calling for “walking between totems and taboos”.
If the leader of the autonomists Gilles Simeoni, cautious, called for waiting for Thursday’s speech, a deputy from his party, Jean-Félix Acquaviva, saw a “desire to converge to find sufficiently strong points of balance which allow to say that tomorrow we will be in an important, even historic, moment.” In this “cordial, sincere and frank exchange”, “the shadow of fear, fears and defensive strategies was not on the menu”, he told AFP.
“I remain reasonably optimistic and this evening I detected a will and a state of mind,” the leader of the opposition autonomists, Jean-Christophe Angelini, also told AFP, assuring that he had “some reasons to believe that It can do it.”
On the side of the local right, Jean-Martin Mondoloni said he expected President Macron “to set the institutional course around a point of balance between the recognition of a singularity to which we are very attached and belonging to the Republic to which we are no less attached.
The Head of State must speak Thursday at 10:00 a.m. before the Corsican Assembly.
After the death in March 2022 of independence activist Yvan Colonna, attacked in Arles prison, where he was serving a life sentence for the assassination of prefect Erignac, and the violent demonstrations that followed on the island, the government had opened discussions, ensuring that they could “go as far as autonomy”.
The presidential speech will therefore punctuate several months of exchanges between Corsican elected officials and state representatives.
Almost united, the nationalists adopted on July 5 an autonomy project pleading for legislative power in all areas except the sovereign, power which would be entrusted to the assembly of Corsica, where they occupy three-quarters of the seats. They also want resident status, co-officiality of the Corsican language and the inclusion of the notion of Corsican people in the Constitution.
A second text from the right-wing minority opposition, which calls for a simple “power to adapt” French laws to Corsican specificities, was also sent to the president.
In an interview on Monday with Corse-Matin, Bruno Retailleau, president of the Les Républicains group in the Senate, warned that the nationalists’ demands crossed “red lines”.
However, the Head of State will need a three-fifths majority, and therefore the Republicans, in Congress (National Assembly and Senate combined) to engrave in stone the Constitution any institutional development of the island. Hence his request, beforehand, for a political agreement on the island between nationalists and the right-wing opposition.
If such an agreement is found, “the President of the Republic will certainly say that he is ready to consider an institutional evolution in accordance with the republican framework”, noted on Tuesday an advisor to Emmanuel Macron.
This mention of a possible agreement by the presidency had led Paul-Félix Benedetti, leader of the independentists of Core in Fronte, to boycott Wednesday evening’s dinner with President Macron whose red lines – maintaining Corsica in the Republic and refusal to create two categories of citizens–correspond to the fundamentals of nationalists.
In addition to this political component, the president will also pay tribute during this visit, his fifth to the island since 2017, to the Corsicans resistant on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the island in 1943.
Thursday noon in Ajaccio, Emmanuel Macron will salute the memory of Corsican resistance fighter Fred Scamaroni and then that of Danielle Casanova, Corsican communist resistance fighter who died in deportation to Auschwitz.
He will then go to Bastia for an arms test in the presence of military units whose history is linked to the liberation of Corsica.
Corsica was the first French territory liberated, on October 4, 1943, thanks to a popular insurrection and the help of French troops from Africa.
28/09/2023 01:24:12 – Ajaccio (AFP) – © 2023 AFP