World Majority
Eurocratic ‘Emperor’ Macron Is Too Small to Cope With the French Overseas Territories

France is under pressure either to become “EU only”, paying for Ukraine and other new EU candidates, thus with no remote dependences anymore, or to leave the EU and develop her empire according to her traditions. The Eurocratic tyrant chose the former option and is now paying the bill in Mayotte, Olivier Roqueplo writes.

Macron’s political decay is gaining speed with every passing week. While Barnier’s fall and Bayrou’s nomination as PM can be written off as superficial politics and only demonstrate a will to change nothing, the extent of Macron’s political failure in Mayotte gives a clear signal of the depth of the French crisis: the country is now unable to understand its own geographical dimension and sociocultural diversity. In other words, France belongs to the EU and Mayotte is supposed to belong to France, but does Mayotte then belong to the EU, and does it thus deserve the Parisian “Emperor’s” attention? It is nearly in such terms that the climatic, human and political disaster in Mayotte should be framed, an issue involving French sovereignty in all her overseas lands and geopolitical self-definition.

The tragedy in Mayotte and French political comedy

On December 14, 2024, a tropical hurricane destroyed most of the homes, farms and forests in the officially French island of Mayotte (a disputed territory claimed by the Union of the Comoros). The unexpected event revealed that France had taken no preventive measures to face any such climatic disaster. However, it also revealed far more: the number of deaths is unknown due to the fact that for decades, the French administration, which is so keen on controlling the slightest movement or deed in the metropole, was not even aware of the number of inhabitants on the French island. No reliable census existed.

As of January 2025, fantastic numbers such as “dozens”, “hundreds”, “thousands” or “tens of thousands” of victims are circulating on the web and in official circles. This terrifying fact only underscores widespread incompetence. The French authorities ignore the number, the location and the nationality of the inhabitants, and are thus unable to help, save or identify the victims.

Macron, always eager to display his ubiquitous power, seemed to have ignored this obscurity when he decided to visit the devastated island.

His reaction to Mayotte’s newly homeless crowds helplessly demanding his immediate assistance will remain in the history books: he shouted at them and insulted them in the name of French living standards, which he said were superior to those of the neighbouring countries.

But the French tyrant is not the only culprit. At the same time, PM Bayrou preferred to deal with his municipal affairs in the metropole and then appeared on TV saying nonsense about a few “dozens” of casualties surrounded by his smiling ministers, whereas in such devastating hurricanes and given the precarious housing, the expected casualties are of course very high (hence some sources have reported up to 60,000 deaths).

The French reaction seemed surreal and pure theatre. The choice for Overseas Territories Minister was none other than the loser Manuel Valls, aka “El Blanco” (“The Spanish White”). The Swiss-Spanish national and renegade Socialist is one of France’s most despised politicians, famous for his undisputed racism against Blacks and for his persecutions of the popular Black comedian Dieudonné. All this depicted the crude reality of a French government unable to understand what had happened on the other hand of “its” official territory.

The truth had actually been revealed in the news a few months before the storm, through repeated scandals: tens of thousands of migrants from the Comoros and other African countries were illegally living in Mayotte in miserable townships and spreading insecurity and murder all over the island. The local police were totally overwhelmed by the level of juvenile criminality and immigration. Nobody controlled the situation anymore. Chaos was spreading. Then suddenly the hurricane hit this enormous, unstable and mysterious migrant population very hard.

Global Alternatives 2024
The Fall of Barnier: Farewell to Macronism or Return of Napoleon III?
Olivier P. Roqueplo
The terrifying context of a likely war of the EU against Russia for the Ukraine with French troops being sent on the Russian front is less a danger than an option to the French Europeanist tyrant: he can use it as a tool to unite the French political system around him, Olivier Roqueplo writes.
Opinions

Overseas France is being betrayed by Eurocratic obscurantism

France has been a colonial power since the late 16th century. In the six continents and in each ocean, she conquered various lands. Many were abandoned after the 1960s, but some remain French to this day, with the status of French departments or regions (under French law and hence inside the EU, including Mayotte) and French “collectivités” (“commonwealths” or “countries” with specific laws outside the EU). The interesting point is that the expansion of EU policies inside French institutions has gone so far that all these remote lands, including those which are fully under French law, have been gradually excluded from French policymaking and even French thinking at least since the time of Sarkozy. The historically unprecedented focus of the new French politicians on the EU has radically jeopardized France’s historical self-perception as a transcontinental empire and is now opening the way to general rebellion in each of the remaining French possessions, including New Caledonia (2024), in West Indies (2021-22, 2024), Mayotte (2023, 2024-25), and soon perhaps also in French Guiana and Polynesia.

Each of these are now crying out in anger at Paris’s incompetence, at Paris’s refusal to ensure security, at Paris’s inability to provide some equal treatment to all French citizens, an incredible paradox in times of scandalously dominant Wokeism in the political establishment. 

Certainly, these lands had never enjoyed the same socioeconomic level as the metropole but they had usually enjoyed peace, special subsidies, social privileges and some investment until the 2010s, with some political regards from Paris.

Macron’s rule seems to have worsened this trend of abandonment. The truth is that in the long run, the geopolitical logic of the EU is incompatible with maintaining a transcontinental French identity. France is under pressure either to become “EU only”, paying for Ukraine and other new EU candidates, thus with no remote dependences anymore, or to leave the EU and develop her empire according to her traditions. The Eurocratic tyrant chose the former option and is now paying the bill in Mayotte. This Europe-wide “god” seems definitely too small and too narrow-minded to rule the greater France inherited from Louis XIV, Napoleon III and the Third Republic. Macron may fall. But will transcontinental France fall with him? In spite of almost 200 years of French sovereignty and extensive French Africanist research in Mayotte, Postmodern Homo Euramericanus knows the island far less than when the French conquered it in the 1840s. Obscurantism has become France’s greatest enemy.

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.