The Corsican delegation that will meet on Thursday with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin in Paris will be made up of 21 elected officials, to open a “historic” cycle of discussions on the future of the island, Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis told AFP on Tuesday. , autonomist president of the Assembly of Corsica.
This first meeting was initially scheduled for early April, but had been postponed due to the violence in Ajaccio and then the presidential and legislative elections.
On Thursday afternoon, 21 elected officials will meet with the minister, said Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis: nine representatives of the Assembly of Corsica (the president and two people from each of the four political groups), the autonomist president of the executive council Gilles Simeoni, the four island deputies, the two Corsican senators, the Corsican MEP, the presidents of the associations of mayors of Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud and the mayors of Ajaccio and Bastia.
A demand for autonomy demanded by the nationalists
For the elected official, this meeting intends to open “a process of discussions with a historic vocation to launch institutional changes, (…) with a view, at least as far as the nationalist majority is concerned, of claiming autonomy, as exists in other Mediterranean regions”, in the Azores or Madeira (Portugal) for example.
“We need this meeting to put the same words on the same things. We have to define the calendar, the method (…) and the spaces in which we are going to be able to work, for several months, talking about everything”, she clarified.
In a document co-signed in mid-March by Gérald Darmanin and Gilles Simeoni, it was specified that the “perimeter” of these meetings would cover “all Corsican issues, without exception”, including “the institutional evolution towards a statute of autonomy that remains to be clarified .
The text, however, recalled “two intangible principles, recalled by the President of the Republic”, which look like red lines: “Corsica in the Republic and the refusal to create two categories of citizens”.
Tensions reignite over the death of Yvan Colonna
Gérald Darmanin, re-elected in Beauvau within the new government, had arrived on the island in mid-March to try to calm the situation after two weeks of demonstrations that turned into riots after the deadly attack on March 2 against pro-independence Yvan Colonna in the Arles prison (Bouches-du-Rhône), where he was serving a life sentence for his role in the 1998 assassination of prefect Claude Erignac in Ajaccio.
For Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, a “wait for the truth” will be repeated on Thursday after “the crisis we are experiencing after Yvan Colonna’s aggression.”
Also on the meeting menu are “a series of files” on “economic, social and energy development issues,” said Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis.
Source: BFM TV
