New Caledonia is part of France, it’s not a different country. If you are a New Caledonian, you are a French citizen.

To your point, geostationary satellites are in orbits around 22,300 miles away while Starlink is in a LEO orbit ~342 miles away. At the speed of light, that’s an additional quarter second round trip time minimum. Absolutely forever in internet speeds. My experience with GEO is a latency >550ms round trip. With the TCP/IP protocol built the way it is (aka, three-way handshake), a webpage wouldn’t even start downloading until almost 2 seconds have passed.