France, explained.
Activists display a banner reading "No to Bougival" along the road to the Customary Senate in Noumea, 20 August 2025 (Delphine Mayeur/AFP via Getty Images)
Noumea’s vote on the next step towards greater autonomy under the Accord reveals that divisions are deepening.
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Support for Bougival Accord waning in New CaledoniaSupport for Bougival Accord waning in New Caledonia
Despite concerted efforts by France’s fragile government to encourage local support for a March 2026 referendum on its Bougival Accord granting New Caledonia more autonomy within France, a vote in New Caledonia’s Congress exposed deepening divisions. The vote delivered minimum endorsement, showing crumbling support for the Accord’s text as signed in June.
On 8 December 2025, the local Congress voted on holding a referendum to implement France’s Bougival Accord, before France’s National Assembly considers enabling legislation. President Emmanuel Macron had originally planned a national constitutional amendment before the referendum. But with support in New Caledonia for the Accord waning, and because the French government has no clear majority to guarantee the necessary agreement of both parliamentary houses for constitutional change, France inverted the original timetable. Parliamentarians will now simply legislate for the referendum to be held on 15 March, the same day as municipal elections, postponing the more complex constitutional amendment.
Already, support for the Bougival Accord was eroding. Only a month after signing it, the core independence coalition, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), withdrew its support. Groups including the Customary Senate, the major Kanak union, and the Kanak Protestant Church all publicly rejected it.
France then decided to postpone already overdue local elections until June 2026, provoking further opposition within New Caledonia.
As the vote approached, other parties to the Accord – including formerly steady supporters, one moderate loyalist party and two moderate independence groups – raised concerns. Adding to the mix, New Caledonia’s mayors opposed organising the referendum to coincide with national municipal elections.
To shore up support, the French government delayed the vote by one week, during which it made some strong concessions. Acceding to a longstanding FLNKS demand, it allowed the return to New Caledonia of FLNKS President Christian Tein, who had been arrested and deported to metropolitan France over his alleged role in 2024 violence. Conscious of FLNKS’s preference for negotiations to take place in New Caledonia rather than Paris, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu despatched a mission headed by Thierry Lataste, a respected French official and founding negotiator of the 1998 Noumea Accord, to conduct a listening exercise and establish how the Accord might be modified to ensure broad local support.
It is difficult to envisage France’s National Assembly, constrained by no natural majority, easily legislating a referendum for New Caledonia given local discomfort with it evident in the Congress vote.
Finally, in a strong gesture by Lecornu’s government, which is currently struggling to pass the national budget, Paris announced 2.2 billion Euros in economic support over the next five years, in return for economic reforms and the territory taking on a greater share of the financial load.
The vote and debate in Congress revealed ongoing deep divisions about New Caledonia’s future and the Bougival Accord, raising the spectre of further unrest.
Speakers for the FLNKS, who voted against the referendum, flatly rejected the Bougival Accord and accused France of imposing it by force, ominously referring to French proposals in the 1980s that led to four years of violence, and Macron’s 2024 unilateral imposition of voter eligibility change that resulted in months of violence and destruction.
Two moderate independence parties, till now Bougival supporters, abstained. They said their requests for clarification of important issues including Kanak identity and attainment of full sovereignty had not been answered, questioned France’s procedural reversal, and called for a revised Accord.
The moderate loyalist Calédonie Ensemble also abstained, querying the legal basis for a referendum without prior constitutional change, and favouring a consensual Accord. The small Éveil Océanien, influential as it switches its support between the roughly equal numbers of independence and loyalist parties, abstained, arguing for consensus and questioning the wisdom of a referendum in the proposed circumstances.
The net result was that, of the 54-member Congress, only 19 pro-France party members supported the referendum, with all 14 FLNKS opposing, and 19 members from a range of parties abstaining. The declared result, which excludes abstentions, favours the referendum by 19 to 14, but belies the strong reservations by a majority of members, demonstrated by 33 abstentions and no votes. In a sense, this replicates the disastrous 2021 independence referendum, which returned an overwhelming rejection of independence largely because independence parties boycotted it, with a deep political impasse ever since.
It is difficult to envisage France’s National Assembly, constrained by having no natural majority, easily legislating a referendum for New Caledonia given local discomfort evidenced by the Congress vote. Already, the national socialists, vital to Prime Minister Lecornu’s parliamentary support to pass the national budget, said they would not support the referendum in the National Assembly.
The tenor of the local debate suggests France would be well advised to hold further discussions to modify the current Bougival Accord text and thereby secure genuine broad-based support, if not consensus, for enduring stability in New Caledonia.
About the author
Denise Fisher
Denise Fisher is a Visiting Fellow at ANU's Centre for European Studies.
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