PARIS, 31 May 2005 — Despite the fact that everyone in France knew it was going to happen, the decisive No cast by French voters in Sunday’s referendum on the new European Constitution has taken the country by surprise — in the sense that no one seems to know what happens next.
Will the government fall? Who will become prime minister: Dominique de Villepin? Nicolas Sarkozi? Will Chirac resign as president? Does he have any credibility on the international stage as a result of this domestic defeat? Will there be a bloodletting in the opposition Socialist Party, with the victorious Noes demanding the party move leftward? Will the French economy suffer? Is France’s voice in Europe diminished? Is the constitution now finally dead and buried? Will the EU be forced to renegotiate a Plan B?
These are the questions that a deeply divided France is now asking itself — divided along the old lines of town against country. It was no accident that Paris alone voted, and substantially, in favor of the constitution while the more rural the area, the higher was the vote against. It has stirred great passions and great interest. Two recent dinner parties I attended were almost ruined as guests took violently opposing views. On Saturday morning, in a Paris cafe less than a stone’s throw from the Louvre, where a couple of friends and I were busy with coffee and croissants, we were constantly asked by the waiters about the vote; they could think of nothing else. For them, their minds were being made up. A vote against would damage France’s reputation; it would make it look foolish.
In conservative rural Aube, just two hours south of the capital, it was very different. There, the No vote was above the national average. Everyone seemed against. The mayor of the village next to the one where I sometimes stay explained that despite the fact that her daughter lives in Bavaria, despite the fact that she is a self-professed Europhile, she had voted against. The constitution was too complicated, she said. It had been the same story from a taxi driver earlier on Sunday. He had downloaded the constitution from the Internet, but had given up trying to understand it after the second page, so voted against.
France is now in a serious political crisis, the first effects of which will be felt today. Yet for all that, the No campaign’s victory will be short lived. That is not simply because the unholy alliance of extreme right, extreme left and Socialist Party rebels who campaigned against the constitution have absolutely nothing else in common and were quite unable to offer any alternative. It is because what they won on Sunday was a diversion — one that will have no long-term bearing on Europe’s future.
Like those who campaigned against it, the voters had too many different agendas. It was largely a protest vote, fueled more by resentment about what is happening in France. It was an anti-government and anti-establishment vote — an expression of widespread discontent with soaring unemployment, threats to job security and an economy almost in recession. But it was also about wanting to turn the clock back, to the certainties of the old EU of the original six members or the later 12, with its generous agricultural subsidies, its generous social conditions, its limited free trade. The No voters feel cold and naked in the global economy and, on reflection, not like free trade that gives jobs to cheaper wage economies like India and China. They want a protectionist EU, with high tariffs to keep out cheap imports, a small EU to keep out cheap labor from Eastern Europe, an EU without the agricultural economies of Poland or Hungary, or Turkey knocking on the door, with which precious agricultural subsidies will have to be shared; they want an EU in which France remains at the center. This is backward-looking, negative thinking.
The vote is an own goal for France. Because of the suspicion that the government will now implement stronger social policies, it will undermine investor confidence, with an even more damaging effect on French jobs.
There is the added danger of France being sidelined within Europe. The EU is not going to listen to a France dreaming of the past. The expansion of the EU cannot be undone. With 25 members, it needs reforming. The old rules are now a means of paralysis. In any event, free trade is an international issue, governed by the World Trade Organization. The EU can no more erect tariff barriers than it can abolish poverty or control the Internet.
The constitution is not dead and buried. It will not be renegotiated. Those in France that say it will be are living in a dream. They are also being arrogant. Several countries have already ratified the constitution (which contrary to its detractors would make the EU more democratic and return powers to the nation states); Spain voted heavily in favor in its referendum. Even if the Netherlands votes against it tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the EU will have said yes to it by the end of the year. What is it that makes the French No campaign think that a French decision outranks anyone else’s? Had France voted Yes and another country said No, France would have been the first to insist that it should vote again, this time correctly, as it insisted (although not alone) that Ireland do so three years ago, having earlier voted No to the Nice Treaty on membership expansion.
France will be told to do the same. At best all it can expect is a pretend renegotiation to let the French think that they are getting something different. But there can be no Plan B. The constitution is already a compromise between those who want a liberal, free market Europe and those who want a Europe where social policies are entrenched. If, as the French No campaign demands, the constitution’s free market objectives are watered down, the Danes and the British — and the Spanish, Italians and all the East Europeans too — will veto it.
The vote will not halt EU reform, of the EU agricultural policy whose retention is so dear to the hearts of rural France, of the voting system and vetoes, of the democratic deficit in the EU’s institutions. But it is a sad and confusing outcome for France in the short term. The demand that France has spoken and that the rest of Europe must accept its verdict does nothing to enhance its reputation. France appears a wrecker, as the UK so often did in the past and, like the UK, offering nothing constructive.
France has come to terms with the fact that, with expansion and in a changing world, Europe is not the same as it once was. The old Franco-German motor, for so long at the heart of it, no longer works, not just because the French and German economies are in deep trouble, but also because the new members of the EU do not want to be run by such a motor; they want a liberal, free-market Europe, a Europe closer to the American model. The French government, the French media, almost the entire French political establishment understand the issue perfectly and support change; they know it is in France’s best long-term interests. But they have not convinced the French people. The longer France clings to the past, the more it is going to be out of step with the rest of Europe. And it will be a France standing alone. Germany looks set this September to elect the CDU’s Angela Merkel as its chancellor. She is much more a trans-Atlanticist than the present chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder.
The European Constitution is not for France alone to decide. If several countries said no, it would be a different matter. The French will be asked to look again, probably when they are not in such bad mood with their government, as will the Dutch if they say No tomorrow. The delightful irony is that it will be left in the hands of the old bad boys of Europe, the British, to sort this mess out. The UK takes over the six-month rotating presidency in July.
