French President Jacques Chirac ended two days of intense but fruitless talks with France’s main political leaders this week still facing one of the most painful dilemmas of his long political career: whether or not to call a referendum to ratify Europe’s new Constitution.
The president is not opposed to a national vote on the issue, and has said he will not make his mind up until a final text is agreed.
But he knows that holding a referendum on Europe could prove his biggest blunder since the disastrous early dissolution of Parliament in 1997.
The political class in France is deeply and unhappily split over the draft European Constitution, drawn up by the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing and now being debated in Brussels.
The communists are firmly opposed to it (saying it represents ”a triumph for economic liberalism”), but the Greens are in favour (they are pro-European come what may). The Socialists, meanwhile, are split three ways and are so unsure about what to think they are holding their own referendum to fix a party line.
On the right, although the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) and its Union for the French Democracy allies would like the draft text approved more or less as it stands, more radical right-wing and anti-European groups are virulently opposed, and find themselves unlikely bedfellows with the far left.
Almost all, however, believe the Constitution should be sorted out by referendum, rather than rubberstamped in Parliament’s upper and lower houses — the second option open to Chirac.
”France’s Constitution was approved by referendum, and it is quite unthinkable that the Constitution [succeeding] it should not be adopted in the same way,” said the pro-sovereignty MP Philippe de Villiers, echoing the communist leader Marie-Georges Buffet, for whom a referendum is ”morally and democratically the only acceptable solution”.
But officials close to the president stress that Chirac, whose political instincts rarely fail him, will ”never in a million years” call a referendum if he thinks it might fail.
”If a no vote looks like carrying it, he’ll be pragmatic,” said one Elysée adviser. ”He would have to stand up — a no vote would be a vote against Chirac.”
The president’s supporters, chief among them his Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, are in a difficult position. ”Any true European cannot not be in favour of a referendum,” Raffarin said last week.
Alain Juppe, the former conservative prime minister, now head of the UMP, said this week: ”I think it would be best, for a text of this importance, for the people to be allowed to express their view.”
Juppe said he was in favour of a cross-party agreement between the UMP and Socialists, to avoid the possibility of an ”unholy alliance of the far right and the far left” derailing the debate for domestic political reasons. — Â