Now Flosse is back as president

Jason Brown
Paris protégé steps out of the nuclear shadows. He turns his head this way and that, offering different angles of an overly well-known face.

Television crews roll digital tape, recording the territory’s least popular politician in a jaw-dropping, last-minute return to power.

Cheers, boos break out across the territorial assembly as the votes are announced, 29 seats in favour.

Oscar Temaru, the first to offer congratulations, garlands Gaston Flosse with a thick ei of fragrant tiare.

The pair embrace, clasping arms, regarding each other at elbow length. They smile audacious smiles.

Images beam across the five million square kilometres of French Polynesia islands, atolls, and out to the French world, bypassing most of the region.

In Paris, presidential officials grit their teeth.

Reporters ask if President Nicholas Sarkozy will still visit French Polynesia in April, as promised to last month’s electoral victor, Gaston Tong Sang.

“Rien ne se décidera à chaud,” says a government source quoted anonymously by Agence France Presse—nothing is decided in the heat of the moment.

Tong Sang won 27 of 57 seats in last month’s second round of general elections, two short of an outright victory for his To Tatou Ai’a—our future—a government-in-waiting.

Between them, Flosse and Temaru held 30 seats.

In the confusion that followed, the orange-bannered party, Tahoera’a Huiraatira considered an offer from Tong Sang, then quickly rejected it. Declaring themselves “profoundly” disappointed, Flosse’s party leader Edouard Fritch held a press conference in which he confirmed all options remained open.

Flosse, suddenly the outsider, a renegade turned rebel, would vote Temaru into the presidency!

As rumours flew, no one imagined Temaru, master of the unexpected, just a day or so later, tendering a last minute withdrawal from the assembly’s presidential vote.

Groans of disbelief and disillusionment broke out across French Polynesia, voters privately protesting at corruption and greed, impressions fuelled by a rapidly pro-Paris press lavishing loads of attention on Tong Sang.

Newly anointed, an autonomist, frequently bemused, Tong Sang reacted with characteristic sanguinity. He described the switch as a “betrayal” of the popular will.

Temaru points out the two parties represent 55% of voters.

No one disputes the claim.

In Pape’ete, an unspoken convention recognises long existing unfairness of Temaru’s constituency boundaries, largest by far, worth at least two or three seats more.

Inside the assembly, one vote paper is left blank, most probably that of Michel Buillard, a defector reported as having spent three years in growing disenchantment with Flosse.

Buillard, now also a deputy at the national assembly in France, as well as mayor of Pape’ete, resigned from the orange-bannered Tahoera’a a full week before the confidence vote.

He now holds the balance of power - creating continuing uncertainty about stability of power in French Polynesia.

However the televised embrace of two of the region’s longest running foes will no doubt be seen soon enough as confirming a historic schism between Paris and Pape’ete, one where two ideologies unite on opposite sides of the same coin-self-determination.

After a lifetime of faithful and often fearsome service as an apologist for trillions in nuclear spending, Flosse naturally resists being dumped like so much garbage on the roadside of the Tong Sang victory ceremonies. A certain illusion of inevitability, while lending an always important appearance of decisive leadership from the Sarkozy administration.

Instead, Paris once again looks foolish, bumbling, its newly anointed candidate left holding baggage from decades of imperial interference in autonomist affairs, a multiparty merry-go-round that Tahiti Pacifique magazine faithfully chronicles as more of the same old corporate corruption and political prostitution.
Many Moruroa millionaires nod their heads in agreement.

Whatever happens next, a gauntlet has been thrown down, supporters of Temaru and Flosse for now staying solidly behind the premise that they do not want to be ruled by a Paris “puppet.”

In changing electoral laws three times in four years, Temaru and Flosse agreed, Paris was the cause of “instability” not the cure.

Local media at first describe the last-minute switch as “surprising.”

A somewhat delighted national media in France amplify the impact, using words like “astonishing” while English-language media follow up with “dizzying.”

Flosse turns his head this way and that, occasionally addressing the cameras, but also keeping an eye on everyone in the many rooms of the French confetti empire.