Gabriel Serville questions Emmanuel Macron's intentions with regard to overseas territories

In a column made public on Tuesday January 14, Gabriel Serville questions the true intentions of the Head of State, Emmanuel Macron, with regard to the overseas territories.

The president of the Territorial Collectivity of Guyana speaks of a “heavy silence” of the head of state since his re-election in 2022. However, recalls Gabriel Serville, he was committed “to rethink the relationship between France and its overseas territories, affirming that the latter had arrived at the end of a cycle”.

In this article, Gabriel Serville suggests taking a look at the two paragraphs of the preamble to the 1958 constitution. According to him, there are “a blatant contradiction in the sense that the first paragraph evokes the French people while the second evokes the people of the overseas territories”.

For the President of the Territorial Community of Guyan, the wording suggests that overseas citizens would be “second class citizens”.

According to him, this ambiguity would not be without consequences in the way in which our territories would be managed. Gabriel Serville deplores the non-respect of the principle of “free determination of peoples”. He believes that instead Paris would maintain a relationship “in a strong paternalistic dose”, often tinged with “reflects of a colonialism that we thought was abolished”,he shouts. He believes that this has “disastrous consequences for the economic development of these territories”.

For Gabriel Serville, it is urgent to develop both the preamble and the body of the constitution. In his conclusion, he refers to Guyana's institutional development project. He wonders about participation in “yet another CIOM, Interministerial Committee for Overseas Territories” dont “we know that the conclusions will never live up to the hopes held by elected officials and the population.”