Cover Story
But In French Polynesia, Flosse In For A Good Year
With more help to come from France
Nearly everything in the garden looks rosy for French Polynesian veteran leader, Gaston Flosse, president of the territorial government without a break since April 1991 and for other terms before that.
In 2002, a Paris court cleared him of corruption charges. In 2001, he easily won the election for control of the 49-set territorial assembly and needn’t bother about it again until 2006.
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Voting, which gave Flosse’s anti-independence party, Tahoerata Huiraatiri, 29 seats, confirmed that at least 70 percent of the territory’s 257,000 people want to stick with France, although with an increasing amount of local self-government.
French Polynesia experiences bouts of sometimes-violent industrial strikes. There are people who worry about the medium to long-term implications of festering relations between the haves and have-nots, particularly since more than half of the population live crammed into the corner of Tahiti, in and around the capital, Papeete and its immediate neighbour, Faa’a, the seat of power of the pro-independence Tavini Huiraatiri party led by Faa’a’s mayor, Oscar Temaru.
But for the time being everything looks good for Flosse. It is likely to be capped off by an expected visit about the middle of this year by President Jacques Chirac, Flosse’s good political buddy and his patron for getting what Flosse wants for a territory France, under Chirac, intends to keep as a power base in the Pacific.
In recent months, Flosse has prised huge concessions from France in the way of more money and political reforms to give France’s Polynesians a sort of semi-citizenship of their own, while remaining French, and much more self government.
Concessions include more foreign policy control and control over labour—meaning keeping out unwanted migrants—and law making. In 1996, after the end of the nuclear bomb tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in the Tuamotu islands, France and French Polynesia, or Tahiti Nui, as Flosse likes to call home now, signed a “Pact of Progress”. This committed France to keep its spending in the territory at the same level as the bomb test period, but with all the money going to development.
That meant 18,000 million Pacific Francs (US$151.65 million) a year. The intention was to rebalance an economy completely unbalanced by the tests by propping up the local economic fundamentals, mainly tourism, pearl farms, and fishing, and putting in much more infrastructure.
The money meant that French Polynesia’s affluent lifestyle and high cost of living with a minimum wage pegged currently at more than US$800 a month would be maintained. The worry was what would happen when, after 10 years, the pact ran out. At best, the territory would be earning only about half the US$1000 million a year spent on imports.
Chirac’s big win in last year’s French election gave him full control of power for the first time. That was an enormous boon for French Polynesia since Chirac became placed to grant Flosse, a strong supporter through the representation French Polynesia has in the Paris assembly, practically anything he asked for. The election eliminated the influence of anti-Chirac politicians opposed to endless heavily subsidising economically unimportant colonies.
Last September, addressing the territorial assembly, Flosse announced that Paris had agreed that the Pact of Progress money would not expire in 2006. But it “will be perpetuated and turned into an overall allowance for economic development.”
That means a guarantee of 18,000 million Pacific Francs a year forever, or at least until the arrival of another French government with other ideas about managing French Polynesia.
Flosse’s government will further more have much more say in deciding how to use the money, meaning less strings from Paris attached to it.
Other vital concessions are the liberalisation of a tax concession scheme to encourage investment in French Polynesia. Flosse said the scheme hadn’t been nearly as useful as it could have been because of interference from socialist politicians in the previous French governments.
While Flosse often acts as if he leads an independent country, and annoyed even the Chirac government last October by flying off to China to be received like a head of an independent state, he’s very firm in rejecting complete independence.
More autonomy meant “more freedom for planning development,” he said. “Autonomy is the most effective rampart against independence. Who hesitates to say that French Polynesia is self-governing when it has been a government for 18 years? The Polynesians reject independence. They are French because they want it and they confirm this at each election. I never regarded autonomy as a step towards independence, but I am keen on our identity being recognised.”
Within a few months, a Pacific Islands Forum delegation will visit French Polynesia for the first time to assess a level of autonomy that Flosse says qualified the territory for observer status at Forum meetings.
