July is a lean month for elections, with nothing of interest on this weekend, but we should have a look at the results from last weekend’s election in New Caledonia (see my preview here). They revealed a territory still very much divided on the question of independence.
Official results are here, but voting figures are only given by province rather than in aggregate (the high commission perhaps not wanting to draw attention to the malapportionment). For the provincial assemblies there’s never any real doubt; the anti-independence side won a big majority in the South province and the pro-independence side won big majorities in the other two, North and Loyalty Islands.
Adding them together, anti-independence parties won 47.9% of the total vote to 41.5% for those on the pro-independence side and 10.7% for neutral parties – in which category I’m including Oceanic Awakening. But because the distribution of seats favors the two smaller provinces, pro-independence parties won 26 seats in the territorial congress (unchanged from 2019), as against 24 anti-independence (down one) and four for Oceanic Awakening (up one).
So overall voter sentiment is very stable, as tends to happen when people vote on ethnic lines. To illustrate I’ve compiled the following table, showing election and referendum results over the last ten years (ignoring the 2021 referendum, when only one side voted).
| Election | Pro-independence | Anti-independence | Neutral | Turnout |
| 2017 French Legislature | 23.3% | 76.5% | 0.2% | 35.7% |
| 2018 Referendum | 43.3% | 56.7% | 81.0% | |
| 2019 Territorial (votes) | 42.4% | 48.6% | 9.0% | 66.5% |
| 2019 Territorial (seats) | 26 | 25 | 3 | |
| 2020 Referendum | 46.7% | 53.3% | 85.7% | |
| 2022 French Legislature | 30.0% | 62.8% | 7.1% | 32.5% |
| 2024 French Legislature | 43.2% | 47.5% | 9.4% | 60.0% |
| 2026 Territorial (votes) | 41.5% | 47.9% | 10.7% | 63.7% |
| 2026 Territorial (seats) | 26 | 24 | 4 |
Up until 2024, turnout for French national elections was much lower, leading to big wins for the anti-independence side – evidently many Kanaks saw the legislature in Paris as irrelevant and didn’t bother to vote. Apart from that, though, there’s not much change: the anti-independence side is consistently in the lead, but never by very much.
There has been some growth in parties that balance between the two sides, including Oceanic Awakening and a new civil-society group Faire Pays (“making a country”), which won a respectable 3.7% of the vote but failed to win a seat. It’s reminiscent of the rise of the Alliance in Northern Ireland, which maintains neutrality between the Catholic/nationalist and Protestant/unionist camps and can hold the balance of power between them.
It’s also important to note the shift that’s happened in recent years within the anti-independence camp. For many years the dominant force was the moderate group Caledonia Together, but in 2019 it was overtaken by the centre-right. Since then it has split, and on Sunday even in South province it fell below the threshold for representation. The centre-right “Strong and United” ticket swept the European community, winning 50.1% of the vote in the South (up 9.6%) and 28 of its 40 seats.
Nor was there much sign of moderation in the pro-independence camp, with those that withdrew from last year’s Bougival accord gaining ground over those that persevered longer with the process. (Nic Maclellan’s report is essential reading here.) But with no majority in sight for either a purely European or Kanak vision of the territory’s future, compromise of some sort seems the only alternative to endless conflict.
The World is Not Enough 