President Emmanuel Macron of France has a lot to manage. The European elections are fast approaching, and his party is predicted to lose. There are the frenzied preparations for the Olympic Games in Paris. A manhunt is underway for a convict whose brazen and deadly jailbreak shocked the country.
The last place many expected Mr. Macron to be was on a plane to one of France’s territories in the Pacific, where riots have been exploding all week. But there he was in New Caledonia on Thursday, with three ministers in tow, on a mission to heal and listen in a territory where many hold him personally responsible for the unrest.
Whether Mr. Macron’s hastily arranged visit will accomplish that is unclear.
The riots were set off by the prospect of a vote last week in the National Assembly in Paris to expand voting rights in the territory by constitutional amendment. Many in the local Indigenous population worry that the law will dilute their power in the territory, which is semiautonomous but still part of France, and hamper a long process toward independence.
Over less than 24 hours, Mr. Macron spoke with local officials and civil-society activists, thanked the police and met — separately — with pro- and anti-independence political forces.
Before hopping back on a plane and returning more than 10,000 miles to mainland France, Mr. Macron said at a news conference that the authorities would end the state of emergency, which was declared last week, only if protesters lifted their barricades and calm returned.
He refused to scrap the contentious change to local voting rules, but said that it would not be immediately “forced through” — he had previously vowed to convene a joint session of Parliament, which has to approve the constitutional change, by the end of June.
Mr. Macron gave pro- and anti-independence groups a month to work toward a global agreement — encompassing voting rules but also local governance, citizenship requirements, economic reform, and other pressing issues — that would be submitted for approval by a popular referendum in New Caledonia.
“I’ve called upon all of those in charge to a form of collective commitment and a willingness to move forward,” the French president said at a news conference in Nouméa, the capital.
“I believe that I made the maximum possible effort for a return to calm,” he said. Now, he added, “I am waiting.”
The trip, in many ways, was classic Macron. He feels that any dispute, no matter how heated, can be resolved through personal dialogue with him. But given the local distrust of the government, many believe his trip is not just short, but shortsighted.
“He has a responsibility for this problem,” said Jean-François Merle, an expert on New Caledonia with the Jean Jaurès Foundation who advised former Prime Minister Michel Rocard during the region’s delicate peace negotiations in the 1980s. “I’m not sure there are political commitments for dialogue — on all sides.”
Riots broke out in New Caledonia, a tiny archipelago of about 270,000, last week, leading to the worst violence there in decades: six dead, many injured and about 400 businesses damaged, many by arson. It was denounced as an “insurrection movement” by Mr. Macron, who promised a state financial aid package. About 3,000 security officers were deployed to restore a tenuous peace.
“This trip is coming way too late,” said Martial Foucault, a political science professor who leads the department of French overseas territories at Sciences Po in Paris. “No one was expecting Macron to go there.”
The discontent stretches back to 2021, when Mr. Macron insisted on holding the territory’s third independence referendum despite pleas from leaders in the Indigenous Kanak community to delay the vote because of the coronavirus pandemic. Many communities had been ravaged by the virus, and local customs prohibited political activity during mourning.
In the end, the Kanak leaders called for a boycott of the vote. They have since refused to accept the results, in which 97 percent of the voters wanted the territory to stay in France but just 44 percent of the population voted. Previous referendums showed much higher voter turnout and resulted in pro-France outcomes of 57 percent and 53 percent.
Mr. Macron and his government considered the vote definitive, closing the long-simmering debate on independence in the territory, which has huge reserves of nickel, a mineral crucial for electric car batteries. He has also emphasized the role of France’s foothold in the Indo-Pacific as a bulwark against China’s expanding influence.
“New Caledonia is French because it has chosen to remain French,” he told a crowd of supporters on a visit last July. “No going back. No stuttering.”
Mr. Macron reiterated on Thursday that the third referendum was final. But he acknowledged that it had not “pacified” roiling debates about New Caledonia’s future, and that wealth inequality in the territory had worsened.
“Collectively, we did not think enough about what would come after,” he said. “The question today is therefore to rebuild that trust.”
It was not immediately clear if independence activists and the more radical loyalist groups would heed Mr. Macron’s words and agree to sit at the negotiating table.
New Caledonia was annexed by France in 1853, and became a penal colony. There, the French government had an explicit policy to turn Indigenous populations into a minority, said Benoît Trépied, an anthropologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research who specializes in New Caledonia.
After tensions and violence between pro-independence militants and loyalists in the 1980s culminated in deadly hostage taking, a peace agreement called the Matignon accords was signed.
That agreement, and the Nouméa accords that followed, gradually handed over much of the political power to the Kanak community, formally acknowledged its culture and customs and set up a three-vote referendum on independence.
As the new century dawned, voting on the independence referendum was put off for two more decades. The French authorities agreed to freeze electoral rolls so that recent arrivals to New Caledonia, who were thought to be more likely to support French rule, could not sway the vote.
For pro-independence forces, the vote in Parliament last week to expand voting rights has threatened a delicate balance by offering people who have lived in New Caledonia for more than 10 years the right to vote in upcoming provincial elections.
The French government argues that the bill is a much-needed fix to the democratic process. Local Kanak leaders see it as the removal of a protection meant to keep them from being turned into an even smaller minority in their own land.
Mr. Macron can talk all he likes, Mr. Trépied said, but without a commitment to hold back the new law and draft a new referendum, he did not foresee that any Kanak leaders would listen. “The political amnesia of Macron and his political movement are irresponsible,” he said.
The government was not facing social protest movements typical to France or even akin to the riots that erupted across the country last summer, Mr. Trépied added: “He’s facing a people that are fighting for their decolonization and who will never, ever back down.”
Pete McKenzie and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
