Mother's Day beats vote in French tropics - 07/06/2009

Paradise islands stay mum

In Saint Denis de la Reunion, Jean-Herve and his wife Marie-Elaine will be among the first at the polling booth tomorrow morning, determined to use their vote to ensure that "France remains for the French".

As the couple - who are proud of their mixed Indian, Malagasy and African blood - complained about rising food prices, immigration and strikes, parrots and tropical birds chattered in the trees overhead. Later today, Brussels' time, the European Union's furthest flung corners in the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean will vote as part of France's biggest Euro constituency that also includes outputs in South America, the Caribbean and handful of small islands off Canada.

Thousands of Dutch citizens in their overseas territories of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao in the Caribbean have already voted.

La Reunion, more than 10,000 from Paris is as legally French as Normandy, although it is almost midway between Africa and India. France's former imperial possessions are now integral parts of the republic and despite being scattered on just about every continent but Europe, are fully part of the EU.

But less than a third of the 2.5 million scattered across the globe in this overseas constituency are likely to vote. An unfortunate calendar clash, which may also lower turnout at the polls in mainland France, has blunted enthusiasm for the vote.

" I'm not sure I'm going to vote on Sunday, because it's Mother's Day. That's more important than the elections," Andree Grondin, a 31-year-old cleaning lady from Reunion told AFP. Others say they will not vote because Europe's institutions mean little to voters tens of thousands of miles away.

"No, I won't bother, because I don't really know what the European Parliament is for," said 40-year-old farmer Pauline Fontaine. "We like Europe, and at the same time it scares us," explained 35-year-old small business owner Charles-Henri Maillot. "On the one hand, over six years it gave us two billion euros in credits that paid to build our roads, our schools and hospitals," he admitted. "One the other, Europe wants to abolish the trade duties that protect our  agriculture from competition from Indian Ocean countries with cheap labour," he said.

Largely thanks to the French overseas territories, Europe has the largest maritime  economic zone in the world, 25 million square kilometres. France as a whole has eight constituencies for the purposes of this weekend's vote. Seven of them are in metropolitan France, which takes in the European mainland and the Mediterranean island of Corsica. The eighth covers the four overseas departments, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Reunion.

The 6,000 people on the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, just off Canada's northwest coast, will thus join those in Tahiti in the South Pacific to pick people to represent them in the European Parliament. At the last European elections in 2004, three candidates from Reunion, the most populated of the islands, were elected.