New Caledonia: Christian Tein, president of the FLNKS, says he is "against" the agreement signed by loyalist and independence leaders

The president of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), Christian Tein , visiting Corsica, indicated on Tuesday that he was personally "against" the Bougival agreement on the future of New Caledonia signed on July 12 by several loyalist and independence leaders.

"Individually, I am against this agreement because it does not meet our expectations, (...) I think we are too far from the path already taken," he told AFP by telephone, on the sidelines of a press conference organized in Bastia by the Corsican independence party Nazione in which he participated.

The Caledonian Union (UC), one of the main pro-independence components of the FLNKS, of which Christian Tein is also a leader, criticized the compromise text in a press release on July 21, deploring that the "fundamentals of the Kanak people's struggle do not appear in it."

The text was signed in the Paris region after ten days of discussions behind closed doors, notably by the FLNKS delegation which, upon returning to New Caledonia, assured that it had only initialed a "draft agreement".

"The pressure that was put on everyone during this period of discussions was terrible," said Christian Tein on Tuesday, who is under judicial supervision after having been in pre-trial detention for a year as part of the investigation into the riots that left 14 dead and two billion euros of damage in New Caledonia in 2024.

Christian Tein defended the Noumea Accord, signed in 1998 , which established progressive autonomy for New Caledonia and which constituted "a leap forward", while the Bougival Accord "is almost a step backward (...) for the Kanak people", he declared.

Asked whether the agreement's proposal to create a "Caledonian state" and "a Caledonian nationality" was a step forward, he replied: "For me, the approach is biased from the outset because the State is still involved, it's a small nation within a large nation and we haven't fought, we haven't engaged in thinking about building our country in this approach."

A FLNKS congress to establish a final position for all independence movements on the Bougival Agreement was scheduled for August 2 but "could be postponed" to "next week," according to Christian Tein, who plans to participate by videoconference, as he is prohibited from traveling to New Caledonia. "We must try to achieve full sovereignty (...) but we see that in the draft agreement, we are far from that," he added.