Supporters of independence from France in New Caledonia -an archipelago in the Pacific- do not recognize the results of the third and last referendum held on the last Sunday, in which the option for “NO” obtained on 96.49% of the votes. Of course heThe vote was marked by a record of abstention: more than half of the population refused to go to the polls.
“The independentistas, gathered in the Strategic Independence Non-Participation Committee, do not recognize the legitimacy of the vote that was confiscated from them. This referendum does not comply with the spirit or the letter of the Noumea agreement,” the statement said.
The referendum had only 43.9 percent participation amid the call of the independentistas to boycott the vote due to the coronavirus pandemic. The group had asked to postpone the popular consultation to September 2022, but the French authorities refused to postpone the date.
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke about it on Sunday after the results were known. The president said that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay”, and asked to respect the result in a “humble” way. Along the same lines, the president of the voting control commission, Francis Lamy, considered that abstention does not affect the legality or transparency of the consultation.
New Caledonia
New Caledonia is an archipelago of islands in the Pacific Ocean, located 2,000 kilometers east of Australia and almost 20,000 kilometers from mainland France. In 1853 France declared that the islands belonged to her.
It is the third referendum since the Matignon Accords of 1988, who sought to close a crisis between natives and descendants of settlers. In 2018, the camp in favor of staying in France won with 56.7 percent of the vote. His support percentage fell three percentage points in the 2020 referendum.
This year, however, it managed to rise to 96.49 percent due to a low participation rate (43.90 percent) from the boycott of the pro-independence activists: to prevent their foreseeable victory from being tarnished, the supporters of remaining as French territory they called for a massive mobilization. Currently, the independentistas, mostly socialists, add 26 of 54 seats in the parliament of the colonial enclave, which France annexed in 1853.
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