Paris pulls back from extra powers for Corsica

Paris has offered Corsica a chance to choose its own political institutions for the first time but has made no concessions to demands for independence, or even limited autonomy, from France.

Corsicans will vote in a referendum on 6 July on whether to merge their three councils – governing two départements (counties) and one region – into a single assembly with powers to raise local taxes and run local government for the island.

However, the plan put forward yesterday by the French Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, abandons the more radical proposals of the previous centre-left government to devolve limited parliamentary and extra tax-raising powers to the perennially unsettled Mediterranean island.

The centre-right French government hopes that the creation of a single assembly for the island will satisfy most Corsicans, who want to see some recognition of their separate identity but do not wish to sever their 200-year-old link with France.

The plan was approved by some – although not all – mainstream politicians on the island yesterday. It was immediately rejected by groups seeking independence, who urged Corsicans to boycott the referendum.

There has been an upsurge in bomb and machine-gun attacks on buildings belonging to the French state in Corsica in recent months. Responsibility for these attacks was admitted on Saturday by the FLNC "Union des Combattants", one of many guerrilla groups operating on the island. The organisation has claimed 17 bomb attacks and 12 drive-by machine-gunnings since the start of the year, saying that it was rejecting in advance the "provocation" of M. Raffarin's widely trailed proposal for a single assembly.

M. Raffarin said yesterday that the new single assembly, operating through two sub-territories for the north and south of the island, would give Corsica a modern, streamlined government. But he made it clear that this was part of the decentralisation of powers that he has proposed for all French regions, not a step towards autonomy or independence.

"For the first time in your long history, you will directly choose your own institutions," he said in the capital, Ajaccio. "Voting for this plan will be a vote for a modern Corsica within a [French] Republic which has chosen to be decentralised."

The previous, Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, adopted the opposite approach. He proposed limited extra powers for a Corsican parliament and devolved government, which might in time become the model for a regionalised France.

M. Raffarin has made decentralisation the centrepiece of plans to reform and slim down the French state. His initial popularity, reaching 70 per cent in some polls, has melted away, however, as he takes the blame for a faltering economy, while President Jacques Chirac basks in widespread approval for his stand against the war in Iraq. An opinion poll yesterday showed that M. Raffarin's approval rating had fallen below 50 per cent for the first time since he was appointed by M. Chirac last May.