Thursday morning, Alexandre Patrou, secretary general for Corsican affairs (Sgac) who represented the prefect of Corsica during the extraordinary general assembly of the Corsican chamber of commerce and industry (CCI), spoke on the project of create two open mixed unions (SMO) at the port and airport by the end of the year.
These SMOs should, according to the statutes presented Thursday morning, grant concessions to the island CCI so that it can continue to manage the island’s ports and airports from January 1, 2025.
But for Mr. Patrou this arrangement would present “a significant legal risk”, which aroused the ire of the autonomous president of the island’s executive council, Gilles Simeoni.
“It is a declaration of war and I tell you again, for me it is not negotiable, there will be no international groups which will manage the ports and airports of Corsica,” said Gilles Simeoni, by denouncing “the decision that the State has just announced today, on the sly, without warning us and by denying its commitment and its word”.
In reaction, the prefect of Corsica, Amaury de Saint-Quentin, told AFP that the State had “no opposition” to the management of Corsican ports and airports by SMOs, but that this management must take place under “direct management” to avoid “the legal risk” of management by “sub-delegation to the Chamber of Commerce”.
There is “no desire on the part of the State” to entrust private groups with the management of island ports and airports, he insisted.
– Financial conflict behind the technical conflict –
But, without waiting for these clarifications, the CCI unions, led by the Corsican workers’ union (STC), immediately launched a spontaneous strike movement which led to the blockade of the four airports and six ports on Thursday afternoon. island and hundreds of travelers.
“All ports and airports in Corsica have been blocked for several hours by the STC,” Laurent Filippi, STC union delegate at the port of Bastia, told AFP. “There is no longer anything taking off, nothing landing and nothing leaving or returning from the ports,” added the union delegate.
A security source and airport sources confirmed these blockages to AFP.
In Ajaccio, Adeline Didier, a sales engineer waiting for a flight to Nice, told AFP of her dismay: “we arrived at 4:30 p.m. and we have no information because, on the application, the flight passes from canceled to delayed to canceled to delayed It was the police who informed us that the flight was cancelled.
To “take care of travelers without solutions”, the Haute-Corse prefecture notably made a gymnasium available to passengers stranded at Bastia airport on Thursday evening.
Calling for support for the strike, a nationalist youth collective “union of youth in struggle” affirmed in a press release Thursday evening: “the French state must in no case leave Corsica to international groups, which could be a stone to the extinction of our country.
But behind this apparently technical conflict between the State and the community of Corsica lies another financial difficulty: Gilles Simeoni is in fact demanding an additional 50 million euros from the State to compensate for the inflation not taken into account in the sum. allocated by the State to ensure territorial continuity between the island and the continent.
A request which is slow to give rise to a response from the new government, already struggling with the degraded financial situation at the national level.
“Reindexing is not given and it is due, it is not begging to remind us of it,” Gilles Simeoni declared Friday at the Corsican Assembly.
“If this allocation does not intervene, we will be unable to maintain the execution of public service delegation contracts in the maritime and air sectors,” Mr. Simeoni warned at the end of September.
This would mean “hundreds of direct jobs threatened” at Air Corsica, Air France, Corsica Linea, La Méridionale and “thousands of indirect jobs, risks of blocking ports and airports”, he added.
