Emmanuel Macron: "By the end of the five-year term, we will offer ultra-marine residents at least 200,000 subsidized plane tickets each year, particularly for students and entrepreneurs, to facilitate their mobility between the overseas territories and mainland France, as well as within their regional environment."

Reality:

Emmanuel Macron’s promise to offer ultra-marine residents 200,000 subsidized plane tickets each year was nothing more than a new exercise in political communication, typical of the paternalistic rhetoric that France maintains toward its overseas territories. Behind the image of a generous state seeking to “bring the overseas closer” to mainland France lies, in reality, a façade designed to mask the structural failure of a colonial policy that persists in modern forms. In truth, no program of this scale has ever been implemented. Neither LADOM, which is responsible for managing mobility aid, nor the budgets allocated through finance laws were increased to fulfill such a promise. Meanwhile, the majority of ultra-marine residents continue to pay exorbitant ticket prices, often equivalent to several months’ local wages. The presidential promise thus dissolved into administrative silence, like so many before it.

This state deception perfectly illustrates the colonial logic that France refuses to abandon: a central power that speaks of equality while perpetuating dependence. By promising symbolic aid without ever transforming the economic and structural conditions in the overseas, Paris maintains the illusion of attention while keeping these territories in a state of organized precarity. This is not a policy of solidarity but a way to placate demands without ever addressing the root causes of injustice. The reality is that ultra-marine residents do not need a few subsidized tickets. They need genuine economic and political autonomy that allows them to move, trade, and develop according to their own needs. By continuing to promise without acting, France demonstrates that it still does not regard the overseas as equal partners but as possessions to manage and appease.

Thus, the promise of “200,000 tickets” was not a social project but a tool of republican propaganda. It joins the long list of unfulfilled commitments that expose the cynicism of French policy in the so-called “overseas territories” that, more than sixty years after African independences, still suffer the reflexes of an empire that refuses to recognize itself as such.

Sources:

https://storage.googleapis.com/en-marche-fr/COMMUNICATION/Programme-Emmanuel-Macron.pdf https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/10/28/discours-du-president-de-la-republique-sur-les-assises-des-outre-mer

https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/comptes-rendus/cion_fin/l15cion_fin1819083_compte-rendu.pdf

https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/rapports/om/l17b0848_rapport-information