PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron drew ire this week for comments made on his visit to the overseas region of Mayotte, which is reeling from the aftermath of a tropical cyclone.
In a clip published Thursday by online news outlet Brut, Macron angrily told an inhabitant of Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean, that the territory would be “10,000 times” worse off without the French state — comments that were swiftly slammed as neocolonialist.
Tropical cyclone Chido struck Mayotte on Saturday and, as of Friday evening, the official toll was 35 dead — though authorities believe hundreds, if not thousands, may have died during the storm. Mayotte, by far France’s poorest region, is home to a large population of undocumented migrants, many of whom live in slums.
Since the cyclone, Mayotte has faced severe water shortages, with most of the territory also hit by network outages.
“You’ve lived something terrible, everyone’s fighting, regardless of their skin color,” Macron was seen telling a crowd. “Don’t pit people against each other … Because you’re happy to be part of France. Because if it wasn’t France, I can tell you that you’d be screwed 10,000 times worse.”
Macron was responding to a comment by a Mahoran woman accusing him of “coming to see us to say that everything’s alright when everything’s going bad.” The clip does not show her at any point discussing Mayotte’s status as a French region or its demography.
In another clip released by BFMTV, Macron is seen being booed and urged to resign.
The Comoros, an East African archipelago, gained independence from France in 1975, but a year later, Mayotte, one of the archipelago’s islands, voted in favor of remaining in France during a referendum organized by Paris. U.N. resolutions do not recognize French sovereignty over the island.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which pledges to stop immigration from the Comoros to Mayotte, has become the most popular party on the island in recent years.
National Rally spokesperson Sébastien Chenu said Macron was unlikely to “comfort” Mayotte’s population which “always feels that they are being treated differently.” Clémentine Autain, an influential left-wing lawmaker, described Macron’s words as “neocolonial speech, unworthy of a president.”
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