<http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/the_massive_def.html>
A POLITICAL REVOLT IN FRANCE --What Rejection of the European Constitution Means
The massive defeat of the new European Constitution by the French in today's referendum means a virtual political revolution in France. The polls have only been closed for an hour as I write, but the exit polls for French public TV show at least a 10% margin of victory for the No vote, with a large 70% voter turnout.
Despite an overwhelming campaign for a Yes vote by the mainstream French media (including a major pro-Yes bias in TV coverage), and by nearly all the major political leaders of left, right, and center -- a scare campaign that tried to (falsely) tell the French that they would be responsible for destroying construction of a united Europe if they voted against this Constitution -- the French electorate's working and middle classes, by their No vote, rejected the unregulated free-market policies, aimed at destroying the welfare state and the social safety net, embodied in the Constitution. (see my earlier analysis, "The New European Constitution: Should Americans Care?")
Today's vote confirms the enormous gap between what the French call "La France d'en haut et la France d'en bas" -- the France of above and the France of below. And this rejection of France's political elites will bring extraordinary changes to the country's political landscape:
1. President Jacques Chirac, who called for this referendum (rather than letting parliament alone ratify it), has taken a slap in the face from which he cannot recover before the presidential elections of 2007. It will now be impossible for Chirac to seek a third presidential term -- and he won't run again, as my friend Claude Angeli (editor of the investigative-satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, dean of French investigative journalists, and author of numerous authoritative insider books on Chirac) just told me on the phone as the results of the referendum became known.
2. Today's vote means that the presidential candidate of the right in two years will be, not Chirac, but Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious chairman of the conservative UMP party. In a televised declaration broadcast just after the exit poll results were announced that had the accents of a presidential campaign speech, Sarkozy said that there must now be a "rupture" with the French economic and social model -- which means a a break with the mixed economy and more ultra-conservative economic and social policies than Chirac has been willing to adopt. Just a few days before the vote, Sarkozy was called "an American" by the head of the center-right UDF party in Chirac's conservative coalition for his support of Bush's war in Iraq and hard-right economic policies that also resemble Bush's. But Sarkozy, who has lead every public opinion poll as the presidential choice of the French for the last two years, is being weakened by the marital scandal which is engulfing him (see my earlier article, "Is France's 'Future President' In Trouble? Nicolas Sarkozy Faces a Crisis."
3. Chirac will immediately change his prime minister, fire the highly unpopular incumbent Jean-Pierre Raffarin (whose popularity in the polls is only in the low 20s) -- and, my friend Angeli just told me, the new prime minister will be ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (the voice of France at the UN against the Iraq war), who is currently Interior Minister. De Villepin, an aristocrat who is Chirac's former chief of staff, is seen by Chirac as the best hope of defeating Sarkozy as the right's candidate in the coming presidential elections. But de Villepin has never been elected to anything and has never faced the voters -- and his less than lustrous performance as Interior Minister, where Chirac placed him to give him a public profile on domestic policy as a law-and order champion (in the ministry where previously Sarkozy had cemented his reputation with repressive law-and-order, anti-immigrant policies) has not exactly done de Villepin much good with the electorate (especially by comparison with his predecessor, Sarkozy).
4. The political revolution flowing from today's vote encompasses the French left. The Socialist Party's top leaders -- including its chief, Francois Hollande, and former Mitterand Culture Minister Jacques Lang (the most popular left pol in the opinion polls thanks to his incessant TV appearances) both campaigned for a Yes vote. But the Socialist electorate, the exit polls showed, voted hugely for the No by 56-44%. Even though Hollande has control of the Socialist Party apparatus, it will now be very difficult for him to be his party's standard-bearer, and Le Canard Enchaine's Angeli told me this afternoon he thinks Hollande's presidential ambitions cannot recover from today's revolt-from-the-bottom of the left electorate.
The Socialist Party's left wing, led by member of parliament Henri Emmanueli (a former party chief) and Senator Jean-Luc Melanchon -- who campaigned hard for the No against the wishes of their party's executive committee -- finds itself reinforced by today's vote. But neither Emmanueli nor Melanchon have the "heft" of a presidential candidate.
Their ally in the campaign for the No vote -- former Socialist Prime Minister under Francois Mitterand Laurent Fabius, who was the target of constant barbs from Hollande and the Socialist leadership during the referendum campaign for breaking party "unity" -- is also reinforced. But Fabius is best remembered in France as the prime minister who carried out Mitterand's break with socialist economics to embrace a free-market program of austerity and privatization in 1982 - and it is precisely that sort of economics which, the exit polls show, French voters (and particularly the left electorate) have rejected today. Fabius' campaign for the Non was widely perceived as political opportunism designed to enhance his presidential ambitions -- and, while he has the "stature" of a possible president, it's hard to see him eliciting much enthusiasm from "La France d'en bas" and the traditional left electorate.
5. Today's vote also is a victory for what is known as "the left of the left" -- there was a united and coordinated campaign for the No vote by the Trotskyist LCR (Revolutionary Communist League), and its popular, media-charismatic spokesman Olivier Besancenot, a young postman who was the party's presidential candidate in 2002; the smaller Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (Workers' Struggle), led by its perennial presidential candidate Arlette Laguiller; the French Communist Party, led by its general secretary, Marie-Georges Buffet, a former Minister of Sports and Youth in a coalition government with the Socialists; and the large "associative left" of extra-party social movements and groups, like the anti-globalization ATTAC. Even a significant segment of gay and lesbian leadership issue a gay manifesto for the No, arguing the Constitution would be bad for LGBT people. There have been discussions and proposals about uniting the "left of the left" in a single electoral formation ever since the presidential elections of 2002, when the surprisingly large vote for the two Trotskyist candidates caused the defeat of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's presidential candidacy for a place in the runoff, in which he was displaced by neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Now, with the momentum from their successful campaign against the No, the "left of the left" may well finally achieve that organizational unity for the 2007 presidential campaign that has long been talked about -- with the addition of the decimated Communists, who used to be part of the "governing left" coalition led by the Socialists along with the Greens. The faction-ridden Greens, by the way, were sharply divided over the European Constitution -- and today's vote will likely provoke a new internal debate that could lead to a rejection of the current Green leadership over the issue of whether or not the Greens should join an electoral coalition of the "left of the left."
Finally, today's vote in France is a good thing for those who oppose the American imperium. Under the Constitution -- which sets in concrete a united Europe's subordination in military and security policy to NATO -- it would take a unanimous vote by every single one of the European Union's 25 countries to adopt a foreign policy position similar to the Franco-German opposition to Bush's war in Iraq. Moreover, any EU country that is a member of the UN Security Council (like France -- or, as in a proposed future enlargement of the Security Council, Germany) would be hobbled in its ability to take an anti-Washington position without consensus approval by all the EU countries as represented in the (un-elected EU Commission headquartered in Brussels.
I couldn't be happier with today's rejection of the European Constitution -- which official returns from the French Interior Ministry, just announced has gained another point, with 56% for the No and 44% for the yes. Get out the champagne!
Posted by Doug Ireland at 06:44 PM