More than six years after arriving at the Élysée, Emmanuel Macron seems finally ready for a compromise that will satisfy the aspirations of the majority of Corsicans and help overcome their endemic unrest. It won’t be easy at all, but the French president took the first step yesterday. In a speech before the Corsican Assembly, in Ajaccio, Macron proposed to recognize the historical, cultural and linguistic uniqueness of the island in the Constitution of the Republic.
The Head of State agreed to give Corsica greater autonomy than the current one, although he warned that this autonomy should not be “neither against the State nor without the State”. Send a warning to the pro-independence sector so they don’t dream of going further. Macron accepted, however, that the island could in the future have regulatory capacity in the transferred powers.
The route plan of the Elysee establishes a deadline of six months for the Corsican political forces to agree on a text, which should be agreed with the State, submitted to a referendum on the island and then voted on by the National Assembly and the Senate in Paris. Macron stated that progress is needed because “the status quo would be a failure for everyone”.
The president spoke of “building an autonomy in Corsica”, adapted to its needs. He did not mention the difficult issue of the co-officialship of the choir, which the nationalists demand and which Paris refuses to accept, because it considers French to be the language of the Republic. He did say, however, that within the framework of this future “unprecedented constitutional recognition, I support that the Corsican language can be taught better and placed at the heart of the life of each choir”. “A public teaching service in favor of bilingualism will be launched – he added -. We must give more space to the Corsican language both in education and in the public sphere”.
In another controversial issue, the so-called “resident status”, an old claim of heartland nationalism, Macron did not mention it expressly, but declared himself in favor of “a fiscal device” to fight real estate speculation and regulate a distorted market that makes life very expensive for the indigenous population.
The president highlighted the investment effort of the State in Corsica in recent years and the importance of continuing to fight organized crime, one of the island’s scourges. He also had a detail with the insular soul when he remembered that 80 years ago Corsica was the first territory freed from the invaders – first Italians and then Germans – during World War II. “Here, no Jews were denounced and the Corsicans protected them”, he added, without specifying that this was not the case in Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist France.
Macron was preceded to the podium by the president of the Assembly, Marie Antoinette Maupertuis, and the head of the Executive Corps, Gilles Simeoni. Both are autonomists and criticized the French State, in harsh interventions, for the long blockade of the Corsican issue, which has caused a lot of frustration and misunderstanding. Simeoni stressed that there must be “a solution within the Republic”, although he warned that, if things continue as they are, there is a danger of becoming “irreversible events”, but he did not specify what referred to The nationalists – between autonomists and independenceists – have been a clear majority in the Corsican Assembly for eight years now.
The heart problem was exacerbated last year following the death in prison, after being attacked by an Islamist, of Yvan Colonna, convicted of terrorism. There were violent demonstrations that reactivated radical nationalism.
