We are living through an age of calculation.
In one corner of the world, the US President sits across from his Chinese counterpart. For the last thirty-six hours, they were discussing trade, tariffs, and Taiwan. Yet humming beneath every exchange—the elephant that fills the room without ever being named—is West Asia’s bleeding. No one expects morality to interrupt power. No one is surprised.
In another corner, Australia’s Foreign Minister landed in Fiji, cheque in hand, an energy reprieve as the offering. The message is not subtle: We are still the premier power in the Pasifika. Meanwhile, Fiji’s Prime Minister meets Papua New Guinea’s leadership at the inaugural Melanesian Ocean Summit in Port Moresby. The other elephant—the plight of West Papua, its people gasping under Indonesian watch—fades further into silence. Not because it has been forgotten, but because Indonesia is watching. Realpolitik does not forget; it simply prioritises.
And then there is Fiji itself.
The Constitutional Reform Commission now travels to the maritime islands, gathering voices. What emerges from those consultations is not merely a debate about legal clauses or individual rights. It is a raw confrontation between two competing logics: the logic of realpolitik and the logic of what we might call idealpolitik.
The urban elite—educated, connected, comfortable—argue for individual rights as the centrepiece of any new constitution. They speak the language of Western liberal democracy: equality before the law, the erasure of ethnic distinctions, the triumph of the citizen over the communal self. They point to the 2013 Constitution, which made “Fijian” a term for all citizens, and they call it progress.
But among the majority iTaukei—especially those outside the urban centres—this is not progress. It is erasure.
For the iTaukei, the term “Fijian” was, is, and will always belong to the first people of this land. The 2013 Constitution did not unify; it dispossessed—of land and of identity. The Bose Levu Vakaturaga (BLV) was removed, not reformed. A cultural and political architecture that had stood for generations, was simply erased. In its place came a single, flattening word: Fijian for everyone.
The iTaukei response, framed in the language of realpolitik, is brutally simple: Power asymmetry must be addressed first.
Why? Because the numbers tell a story our urban elite would rather not read. The iTaukei make up 75 percent of Fiji’s poverty population. Village housing—the foundation of iTaukei communal life—has been left to rot by successive governments, tourist-board images of smiling, happy villagers, notwithstanding. Native lands are leased out under Unimproved Capital Value (UCV) arrangements that ensure landowners receive a pittance in lease payments, while tenants build mansions on these same UCV’d lands. Freehold landowners, meanwhile, face no such shackles; only iTaukei landowners who lease their lands are bound this way. Add to this the cascading crises of drugs, HIV, and non-communicable diseases—all disproportionately affecting iTaukei communities—and the picture becomes impossible to ignore.
The idealpolitik response is to say: These are class issues, not ethnic ones. A bill of individual rights will lift everyone.
But the iTaukei no longer believe this. Their scepticism is not irrational. It is the hard-won wisdom of people who have been “used and abused”—who have seen their identity reduced to a tourism slogan, their institutions dismantled in the name of unity, their material conditions ignored while others prospered.
In realpolitik terms, the iTaukei are now playing the only game that makes sense: they are naming their national interest. And they are saying, bluntly, that Fiji cannot become one nation until the foundational asymmetry between its indigenous people and everyone else is resolved. Not papered over. Not celebrated in cultural performances. Resolved.
The urban elite call this divisive. The iTaukei call it honest.
Consider the parallel with geopolitics. The United States does not raise West Papua with Indonesia because the relationship matters more than the principle. Australia does not mention it because its strategic calculus in the Pasifika runs through Jakarta. And Fiji and PNG, sitting together in Port Moresby, say nothing because to speak is to risk.
That is realpolitik: what works, not what is right.
The iTaukei are now asking whether Fiji’s urban elite are any different. Are they not, too, practising a form of realpolitik—one that preserves a constitution they benefit from, that protects individual rights precisely because those rights do not threaten their own power? Calling it “idealism” does not make it so. Idealism that refuses to see material suffering, is merely privilege dressed up as principle.
The question facing Fiji is not whether to choose between power and principle. The question is: whose power, and whose principle?
For the iTaukei, the way forward is clear. Restore the BLV to its rightful place. Recognise that “Fijian” belongs to the first people. Address land leases so that native owners are not perpetual tenants in their own domain, receiving only a pittance. And do all of this not as a gift, but as a precondition for any genuine national stability.
Without this, the idealpolitik of individual rights will ring hollow. A constitution that makes everyone legally equal while iTaukei villages decay, iTaukei bodies suffer from preventable disease, and iTaukei children grow up in poverty—that is not unity. That is a formula for slow-burning resentment.
The world watches as superpowers choose pragmatism over justice in West Papua. Fiji has the chance to choose differently—not by abandoning pragmatism, but by recognising that true pragmatism begins at home, with the people who have been waiting the longest.
The tensions we feel are not abstract. They are the tensions between those who have been heard and those who have not; between those who benefit from the way things are and those who can no longer afford to wait.
Who are we? We are a nation standing at the edge of a choice: continue the realpolitik of silence, or embrace a different kind of realism—one that understands that a nation which ignores the cry of its first people will never, in the end, be stable.
The elephant in Fiji’s room has a name. It is time to speak it.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 