Are they winning?

France and the European Union

Mar 23rd 2005 PARIS
From The Economist print edition

The shocking risk of a non to the European Union constitution

IT WAS not supposed to happen this fast. When President Jacques Chirac decided to advance France's referendum on the draft European Union constitution to May 29th, the idea was to avoid the “Maastricht scenario”. In 1992 support for that treaty sank over the summer months from 65% to just 51%. This time, with two months still left, two new opinion polls suggest that backing for the constitution has already collapsed: the no vote is now at 51-52%. Is France, architect of Europe, really set to reject its first constitution?

single poll could be a freak. Although the yes vote has clearly been slipping (from 69% in December to 63% in February, according to CSA, the pollster for Le Parisien), such a crumbling of support in one month looks decidedly odd. Yet a second poll conducted by Ipsos for Le Figaro has now agreed with the first one. The yes vote has plunged from 60% in early March to 48%, according to Ipsos.

The two results could still be a blip. Plenty of voters are undecided, know little about the constitution, or see no great issue at stake. If Maastricht is a guide, prediction is perilous: four weeks before the 1992 yes vote, BVA, another pollster, also registered a no of 51%. The shock of the new polls could also galvanise pro-voters—and higher participation should favour a yes. Stunned French politicians have duly begun to dramatise the vote. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former president who chaired the convention that first drafted the constitution, has talked of an “open crisis” if France says no. Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, has talked of a “cataclysm”.

Whether they represent a new trend or not, the new polls show that a French no is now a real possibility. How to explain such a surge of Euro-hostility? Partly, no doubt, it is a protest against an unpopular government, led by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister, which seems to have lost its way at a time when voters are most anxious about jobs and pay. Unemployment is over 10%. Growth is still sluggish. Rents are rising. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets. Yet the government lacks any serious plan to revive the economy or increase jobs. Moreover, a whiff of sleaze hangs in the air, after the resignation of Hervé Gaymard as finance minister over a housing scandal, not to mention the opening this week of a corruption trial that fingers colleagues of Mr Chirac when he was mayor of Paris.

Yet something structural is going on as well: the rise of a new Euroscepticism. In France, a founder member of the European club, this sentiment has in the past belonged largely to the political fringes: the hard left, or Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front. From a tender age, French voters are taught the virtues of Europe. For political leaders, on left and right alike, Europe has been the means of preserving and projecting French power in a world that was otherwise eroding it. In short, Europe offered comfort: protection from decline; reaffirmation of their social model; the foundation of peace.

This sense of comfort is now falling away. In its place, Europe is increasingly seen as a menace: a destroyer of privileges and a source of new threats. Take the two issues that vex the French most just now, neither related to the constitution, but both overshadowing it: the European Commission's directive to liberalise services, which Mr Chirac ripped apart, just as he had earlier torn up the euro area's stability and growth pact, at this week's EU summit; and Turkey's possible EU membership. The first, introduced by Frits Bolkestein, a Dutch liberal, has become an emblem of French fears about an “ultra-liberal” Europe. There may be genuine concerns about lower wages or safety. But nobody has even tried to explain the merits of the measure, although it was approved by the two French commissioners at the time (one of them, Michel Barnier, is now foreign minister). It has rather become, as one socialist puts it, a symbol of “Europe's drift towards liberalisation”.

Frustration with the services directive is intense. There is incomprehension over how Brussels failed to grasp French sensitivity. After Mr Chirac telephoned José Manuel Barroso, the commission president, to complain about the directive, Mr Barroso replied this week by swiping at French political leaders. “The referendum is not about the Bolkestein directive,” he declared, adding that any confusion in French minds was “not our fault”, that France was not the only EU member, and that he had no intention of shelving his economic programme just because of the French referendum.

The prospect of Turkish entry has unleashed comparable levels of exasperation among the French. In this case, Mr Chirac is in favour, but most French voters are against—and they have not been appeased by the promise of another referendum before Turkey joins. Opposition is not provoked by a large Turkish population in France, nor is it only about the problems of taking in a big, poor and mainly Muslim country. Rather, the inclusion of Turkey is seen as yet another symbol of the transformation of the EU into a loose confederation, lacking political ambition, and far removed from the founding French idea.

It is this notion of the “wrong sort of Europe” that mobilises the no campaigners. Laurent Fabius, the Socialist Party's number two, supported Maastricht, and still calls himself “fundamentally pro-European”. But now he fears that “Europe will become just a free-trade zone”. Better to return to the Nice treaty, and start again. His views have been influential, despite efforts by François Hollande, his pro-constitution party leader, to drown them out. The two new polls confirm that most of the growing no sentiment is on the left. Among supporters of the ruling UMP party, 70% say they would vote yes. On the left, support has dropped from 54% to 45%.

French Euroscepticism is thus the polar opposite of the British variety: it is not anti-Europe but rather anti-liberal Europe. It represents a desire to go back to the comfort zone. But this is surely a delusion. For it is highly unlikely that the French, any more than the British, would secure a new EU treaty that is any more to their taste should they reject the draft constitution.

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