Confounding pollsters, pundits and politicians alike, public opinion in France has swung back behind a no vote to the new European constitution, say three surveys published on Wednesday.
Less than two weeks before France’s May 29 referendum on the treaty, the polls by the TNS-Sofres, Ipsos and CSA agencies for Le Monde, Le Figaro and Le Parisien newspapers showed support for the no camp, trailing since the end of April, had bounced back to between 51% and 53%.
”The battle is very far from won,” Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said, adding that the yes camp — led by the centre-right government of the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and a majority of the opposition Socialists — would need to find new arguments to convince a deeply sceptical electorate.
”I am worried,” said a leading Socialist, Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris. ”In 12 days, anything is possible.”
The treaty, which is designed to make the EU more transparent, more democratic and more efficient, must be approved by all 25 member states to come into effect. Many observers say its rejection by France would plunge the EU into institutional paralysis.
The former European Commission president Romano Prodi said a no vote would trigger a ”major political crisis” for the EU. Writing in Le Figaro, Prodi said that without France, the European project ”would transform into what the tenants of ‘no’ say they want to avoid: a large market without political union or social dimension.”
Support for a yes vote, which last September was as high as 68%, slumped to less than 50% in March. It then rebounded earlier this month. But Wednesday’s polls showed the no camp had more than made up the lost ground on both the left and the right.
In the TNS-Sofres poll, 54% of Socialist voters said they planned to vote no, 4% more than at the end of April, while support for the yes camp among the voters of the ruling centre-right had slid 6%.
French opposition to the constitution spans political divides, uniting the far right National Front, which argues that the treaty will lead to an irreversible loss of sovereignty and national identity, and the far-left Communists and Trotskyists, who believe Europe is all one big capitalist plot anyway. The mainstream left opposition says that adopting the treaty will amount to waving goodbye to French jobs and public services. — Â