Overview

• The Paris meetings will bring together both independence proponents and loyalist representatives to clarify economic, political and institutional questions on the archipelago’s future status
• They follow the collapse of Manuel Valls’s three-day closed-door talks in early May, the first all-party negotiations on status since 2019
• Violence in May 2024, sparked by a contested plan to expand the provincial electoral roll, claimed 14 lives and inflicted billions of euros in damage
• A stalemate has prevailed since the 2021 self-determination referendum, which was boycotted by independence supporters and left the political process frozen
• Some non-independence figures, including Nicolas Metzdorf and Sonia Backès, argued that Valls’s ‘double nationality’ proposal amounted to de facto independence and deepened the divide