For several days now, Gabriel Serville has been angry. The president of French Guiana feels that there is a "double standard" between his territory on the South American continent and Corsica. On March 12, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and Corsican elected officials agreed on a plan to revise the Constitution to "provide for the recognition of an autonomous status for Corsica within the Republic, which takes account of its specific interests."

In French Guiana, however, a congress of elected officials voted in January 2020 to propose autonomy within the framework of a specific status, called "sui generis." Four years later, after three more congresses and 26 meetings of the local steering committee, there has still been no discussion with Paris on a text to enshrine the new status in the Constitution. "For Corsica, which is 160 kilometers from France, they talk to me about cultural particularity and insularity," said Serville. "French Guiana, which is 7,000 kilometers away and has its own truths, deserves a hundred times more to be taken for what it is, but they're trying to make us go nuts," the regional president fumed.

After French Guiana MP Justin Catayée's aborted "special status" project in 1959, the debate on changing the status resurfaced at the end of the 1990s, in a territory the size of Austria with rapidly growing demographics, plagued by high unemployment. In 2010, 69.8% of voters rejected the autonomy project put forward by a majority of elected officials, within the framework of Article 74 of the Constitution, which defines the roles of overseas local government.

The debate was revived during the popular mobilization of 2017, which lasted nearly three weeks. The territory's changing status was then enshrined in the "French Guiana Agreement," signed with the government following the social movement. Elected as president of the region in June 2021 at the head of a left-leaning coalition, Serville has made the evolution of political institutions his priority.

President Emmanuel Macron is visiting the region for the first time since 2017 on Monday, March 25. He is expected to tell elected officials in the capital, Cayenne, that he remains open to an adapted status for French Guiana. But the government believes that the deliberations of the local congress do not yet form a project that can be resubmitted to the population.

Former Socialist justice minister Christiane Taubira, who is from French Guiana, disagrees. She said that the territory's political demands have become clearer since 2010, and that a project is ready. "Emmanuel Macron is playing for time. There are local shortcomings, but they are a pretext for not moving forward, and it's a miscalculation on the part of the state to consider that the territory's political leaders are inconsistent or unclear in their will," said Taubira. "We've reached an impasse. The application of the French system in the Amazon region remains an absurdity, and all sectors of economic life explain that French standards don't work."

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