{news} Fw: USGP-INT What France's rejection of the Euro Constitution means (Doug Ireland)

[Justine McCabe]

FYI.  See mention of French Greens below.

BTW, I recently met Swedish Green MP Lotte Hedstrom who was in NY 
representing her country at the nuclear non-proliferation meetings. (NY 
Green Julia Willebrand, co-chair of the GPUS International Committee hosted 
a potluck for IC members and NY Greens to meet Lotte). Lotte and the Swedish 
Greens voted against the European Constitution which the European Green 
Party did pass by a very slim vote.  Accordingly to Lotte, this issue 
highlights the ongoing/frequent tension between European Green Party members 
and Greens elected to government who then must work in coalition.  For 
example, she said that the significant opposition by European Green party 
members to passing the Constitution in its current form was overwhelmed at 
the Euro Greens meeting by a push for a "yes" vote particularly by Germany's 
Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (among others).

Justine


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: <usgp-media at gp-us.org>; <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 3:26 AM
Subject: USGP-INT What France's rejection of the Euro Constitution means 
(Doug Ireland)


A POLITICAL REVOLT IN FRANCE -- What Rejection of
 the European Constitution Means (Updated)

 DIRELAND [Journalist Doug Ireland's web log]
 May 29, 2005
 http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/the_massive_def.html


 The massive defeat of the new European
 Constitution by the French in today's referendum
 means a virtual political revolution in France --
 a rebellion by the people against the political
 elites of both left and right. The No vote won by
 a wide margin of nearly ten points -- the latest
 figures show 54.87% for the No, 45.13% for the
 Yes. Despite an overwhelming campaign for a Yes
 vote by the mainstream French media (including a
 major pro-Yes bias in TV coverage), and tireless
 stumping for a Yes vote by nearly all the major
 political leaders of left, right, and center -- 
 a scare campaign that tried to (falsely) tell the
 overwhelmingly pro-European French that they
 would be responsible for destroying construction
 of a united Europe if they voted against this
 anti-democratic 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?"
 <http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/04/the_new_europea.html>)

 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 and media 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 and bypass the voters, as German
 Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did), has taken a
 slap in the face from which he cannot recover
 before the presidential elections of 2007. Right
 after his two, carefully staged, prime-time TV
 appearances to campaign for a Yes vote, the No
 went up several points in the polls each time.
 Not only is he incredibly enfeebled on the
 European and world stages, it will now be
 quasi-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 from Paris
 on the phone as the results of the referendum
 became known.

 (Angeli also has the view -- as I do -- that, had
 it not been for the extraordinary beating of the
 drums for the Yes by the mainstream media, the No
 vote would have been even larger. For example,
 when the largest newsweekly, the mildly-left
 Nouvel Observateur, ran a cover photo of a
 finger-ponting, respected former European
 Commission president Jacques Delors, with the
 demagogic headline against the No, "THEY'RE LYING
 TO YOU!'' the mag's editor, Laurent Jofrin,
 rewrote and deformed Delors' words to strenghen
 their anti-No content -- much to the dismay of
 much of the magazine's editorial staff, which was
 quite divided on the referendum. As a result,
 Delors felt obliged to make a much-publicized
 declaration that -- contrary to what the Nouvel
 Obs' article made him say -- there was a "Plan
 B," a way forward toward a more united Europe
 even if the Constitution was defeated. This
 Delors turnabout was a major media victory for
 the No forces, and it helped persuade a lot of
 moderate and left voters that they were, indeed,
 being lied to -- but by the Yes camp and the
 media.)

 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 -- by
 which he means a break with the mixed economy,
 and more ultra-conservative, deregulatory
 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, Francois Bayrou, for
 Sarkozy's support of Bush's war in Iraq and
 hard-right economic policies that also resemble
 Bush's.  But Sarkozy (seen at right as his puppet
 character on the satirical TV show "Les
 Guignols"), who has led 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."
 <http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/frances_future_.html>)

 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 -- despite a
 lot of pressue from the ranks of Chirac's
 parliamentary party to name Sarkozy. (Tomorrow's
 Le Monde is also now reporting that De Villepin
 "appears to be" the next p.m.) 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 (see photo at left) , and
 former Mitterand Culture Minister Jacques Lang
 (the most popular left pol in the opinion polls,
 thanks to his incessant TV appearances (see photo
 at right) -- campaigned for a Yes vote. But the
 Socialist electorate, the exit polls showed,
 voted hugely for the No by 56-44%. Even though
 the uncharismatic Hollande has control of the
 Socialist Party apparatus (at least for the
 moment), it will now be very difficult for him to
 be his party's standard-bearer in '07, 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 Emmanuelli (a former party
 chief-- see photo at right)  and Senator Jean-Luc
 Melanchon, leaders of the "Nouveau Monde"
 tendency within the party -- who campaigned hard
 for the No against the wishes of their party's
 executive committee -- finds itself reinforced by
 today's vote. But neither Emmanuelli nor
 Melanchon have the "heft" of a serious
 presidential candidate.

 Their ally in the campaign for the No vote -- a
 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 No 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
 (see photo at right) ;  by 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 by the large "associative left"
 of extra-party social movements and groups, like
 the anti-globalization ATTAC, and the leader of
 the Confederation paysanne, the popular Jose Bove
 (photo left) , who is appreciated by left
 militants of all stripes. Even a significant
 segment of gay and lesbian leadership issued a
 gay manifesto for the No, arguing the
Constitution would be bad for LGBT people. The
smaller, hardline, ultra-sectarian Trotskyist
group Lutte Ouvriere (Workers' Struggle), led by
 its perennial presidential candidate Arlette
 Laguiller, also urged a No vote--but did not join
 the coordinated campaign by the "left of the
 left."

 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
 protest vote for the two Trotskyist candidates by
 defecting Socialist and Communist voters 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 for 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 -- and with the probable participation of
 the decimated Communists (now less than 3.5% of
 the electorate), who used to be part of the
 "governing left" coalition led by the Socialists,
 and which included the Greens. The faction-ridden
Greens, by the way, were sharply divided over the
European Constitution, although the party
supported a Yes vote by a narrow majority -- 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."
And it is not entirely out of the question that
some elements of the Socialist Party's left wing
-- particularly Melanchon's faction -- could
split from the Socialists and join that
coalition. There will certainly be an emergency
Socialist Party Congress called in the wake of
> today's vote, which disavowed the Pary's adopted
Yes position -- the party's left wing includes
the moderate-left, process-oriented Nouveau Parti
Socialiste tendency led by the hyperambitious
deputy Arnaud Montebourg (photo right), which
favors a new French Constitution for a VIth
Republic, and was also for the No but much less
active in campaigning -- and Montebourg will
undoubtedly join the Emmanuelli-Melanchon group,
which led the campaign for a "Non socialiste," in
challenging the current leadership of the party's
"elephants," as the old guard in power are known.

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.

So, I couldn't be happier with today's rejection
of the European Constitution by the French
electorate. If Germany's voters had been given a
choice in a referendum, they would probably have
voted No as well. However, in the Netherlands --
where polls are also showing the No winning in a
referendum to be held there in three days -- the
Dutch will probably join the popular movement of
refusal of a Europe constructed for the benefit
of the multinational corporations. Get out the
champagne!

 Posted by Doug Ireland at 06:44 PM