Election day

Most of the world's attention is focused on the primary elections in the United States right now, but today is election day in French Polynesia. French Polynesian politics is complicated and I don't profess to understand it, but the major issue here is independence from France. A secondary issue is instability. For most of the past several years, control of the Assemblée de la Polynésie française has switched hands every six months or so between the pro-France (or as it is called here, "pro-autonomy") Tahoeraa Huiraatira and the pro-independence Tavini Huiraatira (which as far as I can tell is the same as the Union pour la Démocratie, the name that also appears in the media). Tahoeraa is formally allied with the UMP (Sarkozy and Chirac's party) in metropolitan France, and Tavini is formally allied with the French Socialist Party. French Polynesia is a parliamentary system, so currently, UPLD is the ruling party, and its president Oscar Temaru is president of French Polynesia. A few days ago, he got a last-minute endorsement from last year's French Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal. Correspondingly, Tahoeraa is headed by Gaston Flosse, who has been French Polynesian president for much of the past 25 years and is a close friend of Jacques Chirac. In turn, there are a number of smaller parties, and Assembly members from outer islands who have switched between Tahoeraa and Tavini over the years in order to gain influence or ministerial posts. This is a primary cause of the instability.

These elections were originally scheduled for May 2009, but have been brought forward in order to attempt to overcome the political instability that has afflicted French Polynesia for the past few years. French Polynesia has a substantial amount of autonomy compared to other French territories, codified in a law passed by the French Assemblée nationale, but France is able to occasionally intervene in local politics, as it did in this case. The actual constitutional basis for this intervention is extremely unclear to me, and there has been a lot of discussion about how the particular way the autonomy law has been written is responsible for the current institutional instability. As far as I can tell, the solution to this instability is supposed to be a modification of the autonomy law, and earlier elections in the hope that the composition of the new Assembly will be more stable.

Politics here is pretty acrimonious, in the same way as US politics has been during the Bush Administration, with support for and against independence fairly evenly divided. The elephant in the room is racism, which plays a similar inflammatory role to religion and secularism in US politics. Temaru is accused by his opponents of being racist, and wanting power for himself; he gave a speech to the UN saying that Tahiti wanted its independence, and made a highly controversial joke in Tahitian the gist of which was that Polynesian women should not sleep with white men. Flosse is accused by his opponents of being profoundly corrupt, and of changing his political views every few years to keep power to himself. Much is made of his friendship with Chirac. The previous government (from December 2006 to September 2007) was led by Gaston Tong Sang from Tahoeraa Huiraatira; his own party rebelled against him, and in the summer of last year Flosse and Temaru announced that they had overcome their differences and were now allies, with the result that Tong Song lost a confidence vote in the Assembly, and Temaru became president again. Unsurprisingly, Tahoeraa and Tavini have now gone on ahead and are running as separate parties in this election. Tong Song, banished from his former party, has started a new one called To Tatou Ai'a.

We will have to see whether the new Assembly is more stable than the previous one.