An embattled Jacques Chirac will on Tuesday appear live on television in an attempt to swing reluctant France around to a yes vote in the country’s referendum for the European Constitution.
Although his campaign so far has failed to completely allay deep-rooted French fears that they are about to fall under the shadow of an Anglo-Saxon neoliberal model of Europe, three polls on Monday showed the ”yes” camp making up lost ground.
In a poll for Le Figaro newspaper, the Ipsos agency put the yes camp at 53%, and the no at 47%. A BVA poll for L’Express magazine found the no lead had slipped to 52% from 58% a week earlier. In a Louis Harris poll, 51% said they would vote no — two points down from a similar poll two weeks earlier.
On Monday, the French president wheeled out a group of ageing celebrities to bolster his lacklustre campaign. The singers Johnny Hallyday and Françoise Hardy, film makers Jean-Jacques Annaud and Claude Lelouch, and the actor Jeanne Moreau joined Marianne Faithfull and the designer Vivienne Westwood in a meeting of European culture ministers intended to underline the message that France would not lose its cultural identity under the proposed Constitution.
Hallyday said: ”The French can’t stay outside Europe. It exists and we must exist within it. I am French and I will stay French.”
Chirac said: ”Being European does not mean abandoning oneself. It means being more French, more German, more Polish, but sharing a common destiny.”
In an argument familiar to a British audience, the president claimed that France would become stronger working within an enlarged EU than by going it alone. ”Our nations can at last forge a common destiny supported by the same ideas,” he said.
”That is what allows you today to adopt a Constitution to found the future of our continent, not only on the union of our economic interest, but also on a community of values, of principles and ideas that makes Europe a unique whole.”
Chirac is playing for high stakes. On the week of his 10th anniversary as president, his popularity has sunk to a new low — only 28% say they are satisfied with his presidency — and his centre-right government is in trouble over a modest proposal to declare Whitsun (May 15) a working holiday and donate a day’s wages to a social fund for the elderly and disabled.
ON Monday his unpopular Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, set up the fund, designed to raise â,¬2-billion, to avoid a repeat of the tragedy France faced two summers ago when a heatwave killed 15 000 people. But Raffarin faced a legal challenge in the courts claiming ”forced labour”, and many unions have vowed to strike that day.
Raffarin insisted that his national day of solidarity was ”a decisive step in the struggle against the isolation of old people and against collective indifference”. – Guardian Unlimited Â