Associated News, page-3312

It's quite messy actually, the protests are around an electoral change that has previously prevented recent migrants from voting.

As part of the Nouméa Accord of 1998, the population of New Caledonia continued to vote in national elections—for the French president and National Assembly—but the number of people who can vote in provincial elections and independence referendums was restricted. This so-called "frozen electorate" consists only of those who were already living in New Caledonia in 1998 as well as their children, provided they maintained uninterrupted residence for ten years prior to each election. This deprived later immigrants, whether European or Polynesian, of voting rights. The number of excluded voters increased from 8,000 in 1999 to 18,000 in 2009 and to 42,000 in 2023, by which time almost one national voter out of five was excluded from participating in provincial elections (of 220,000 national voters only 178,000 were eligible).

This restriction aimed at preventing the disempowerment of the native Kanak community that would result from the arrival in large number of people from metropolitan France. Following a ruling by the French Constitutional Council in 1999 which limited the restriction to a simple ten-year residency requirement (a so-called "rolling electorate"), French president Jacques Chirac promised to have the French constitution amended on the request of independence groups in 2003. His parliamentary majority voted for the revision in 2007, thereby reverting to the "frozen electorate" rule. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2005 that the restriction did not infringe the right to free elections and did not give rise to discrimination on the grounds of national origin since "New Caledonia's current status reflects a transitional phase prior to the acquisition of full sovereignty and is part of a process of self-determination", with the system then in place being "incomplete and provisional", which has been interpreted to mean that the frozen electorate was validated on the condition that it was only a provisional measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_New_Caledonia_unrest

They also have a lot of legal and illegal firearms, there's believed to be about 100k guns for a population of 282k.