Referendum in France
The French ‘No’ and its consequences
By Murray Smith
The resounding “No” vote in France’s May 29th referendum on the European constitutional treaty is still reverberating through Europe. After six months of campaigning, voters rejected the treaty by a majority of nearly 55 per cent. It would be an understatement to say that this was not the result the French ruling class and it partners in the European Union had been hoping for. Indeed, had French president Jacques Chirac had any idea that voters were going to reject the treaty, he would never have called a referendum. He would, like the majority of his colleagues in the EU, have simply had the treaty approved by Parliament. But Chirac was sure that he would win the referendum and that the treaty – and himself – would then have increased legitimacy in the eyes of the French people. The result was the exact opposite. The proposed Constitution is largely discredited in France and increasingly so in Europe, especially following the Dutch “No” vote three days after the French. And Chirac himself is plumbing new depths of unpopularity.
The campaign for a “Yes” vote was supported by the government, the two mainstream right-wing parties (the UMP and the UDF), by the leaderships of the Socialist Party (SP) and the Greens, by the employers’ association MEDEF and practically all France’s top bosses, and by virtually the entire media. So it would be reasonable to ask what went wrong and who put a spike in the wheel of the ruling class’s plans. The forces on the Left who opposed the treaty launched a determined campaign, and in the end it was above all the votes of ordinary working people who made the “No” win.
Last autumn, the “Appeal of the 200” was launched. This was a clear call to reject the treaty not on the basis of French nationalism, xenophobic attitudes, or opposition to Turkey joining the EU, but on the basis of a call for another Europe, for a “social and internationalist No”. On the basis of this appeal there were – by the time the referendum was held – around 1000 local collectives campaigning for a “No from the left”. The main political forces involved were the Communist Party and the LCR (the Revolutionary Communist League, which is the French section of the Fourth International), but the collectives also included many trade unionists, global justice campaigners and community activists. Significantly they also included militants from the Socialist Party and the Greens. The Socialist Party organized an internal referendum on the Constitution last November. The result was 60 per cent for “Yes” and 40 per cent for “No”. Some of the minority accepted the vote. Others joined the united front campaign launched by the Appeal of the 200. Former First Secretary Henri Emmanuelli, who did not want to be associated with the radical Left, ran his own campaign. Former Prime minister and SP number 2, Laurent Fabius, also ran his own campaign, using his access to the media very effectively. The Greens also organized an internal vote with a narrower result in favour, 53 per cent. As with the SP, those in the minority campaigned actively for a “No” vote. Nevertheless, as 2004 ended a “Yes” vote still looked likely.
But the first months of 2005 reinforced the “No” campaign. From January on there was a sharp upswing in social mobilisations – over wages, defence of public services and defence of the 35-hour week. There was also a large student movement throughout the spring. So the referendum campaign was taking place against a background of social unrest, which made it easier to make the link between the government’s policies in France and the proposed Constitution. Things also moved on the trade union front. In February the main union confederation, the CGT, came out in favour of rejecting the treaty, going against its own general secretary. Militants from the CGT, the main teachers’ union the FSU and the radical union federation Solidaires were actively involved in the campaign. The global justice movement ATTAC and the Peasant Confederation also campaigned for a “No”. The mass political campaign for a “No from the Left” – with more than 200,000 people attending its public meetings - was the decisive factor in the referendum results.
The constitution was comprehensively unmasked and revealed for what it was. First, it aimed to set free-market policies in stone and dismantle what remains of the European social model. Indeed, the whole of part III – the longest part and the part which was given constitutional status – was one long ode in praise of the free market economy.
Second, the anti-democratic implications of the constitution were clear: the constitution contained provisions which would take power away from national parliaments and place it not in the largely powerless European Parliament, but in the hands of the non-elected Council of Ministers and the Commission.
Finally, by approving the constitution, states committed themselves to increasing their military spending and working more closely with NATO. Such a provision would negate the possibility of ever having a Europe more peaceful and less militaristic than its US counterpart.
Voting on May 29th fell along class and age lines – 80 per cent of manual workers voted “No” as did a majority of all those earning less than 3,000 euros a month. Nearly 60 per cent of 18-34 year-olds and 65 per cent of 35-49 year-olds also voted “No” – the “Yes” was only in a majority among those over 65.
In France, the result of the referendum has provoked a crisis of political legitimacy. In February, the two houses of Parliament approved the treaty by a majority of 92 per cent. That shows the extent of the gulf between French public opinion and its elected representatives. Chirac is now in a very vulnerable position. Chirac’s newly-appointed Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, presides over a weak government, but one which is stubbornly pursuing the neo-liberal agenda. The one strong figure is Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the UMP and Minister of the Interior, who has aggressively pursued this agenda. Sarkozy actively cultivates a right-wing populist discourse, appealing to voters of the far right National Front, which is currently in disarray. He has his eye on the presidency in 2007.
But it is not only the Right that is in crisis. The Socialist Party majority was disavowed by its own electors, 59 per cent of whom voted “No”. The reaction of the leadership around François Hollande was to close ranks and purge the party’s leading bodies of partisans of the “No”. The SP is now headed for a congress of crisis in November, whose outcome cannot be predicted. A victory for Fabius would make it easier to patch together an alliance with the CP and the Greens. But Fabius, in spite of his “No”, has not broken from social-liberalism (the social democratic version of neo-liberalism). A new Union of the Left would be contradictory to the dynamic of the “No from the left” campaign. The challenge for anti-capitalist forces is to use this dynamic to advance a broad anti-capitalist alliance that breaks from social-liberalism. That is what the LCR is defending in the collectives, which continue to exist, and in the debates with the CP and the other political components of the “No from the left”.
On a European level, the French and Dutch “No’s” have probably killed the constitutional treaty. The results were sufficiently decisive to rule out simply re-running the two referendums. But the European ruling classes have not abandoned the project that the Constitution was meant to legitimise. They will push forward the neoliberal project and much of what was in the constitutional treaty by means of circulars, decrees and inter-governmental agreements. In the eventuality of a new “less than constitutional” treaty being negotiated, the only countries in the Union that are required by their national constitutions to organise referenda are Denmark and Ireland. They might refuse, but that would have less impact and be easier to handle than the votes in France and Holland.
The popular refusal of the anticipated Constitution in France and Holland has shaken the European ruling classes and will accentuate the contradictions between them. But if Left forces do not advance beyond what they have accomplished thus far, the ruling classes will retake the initiative. That is why the left forces that led the “No” campaigns in the two countries have the responsibility to take their own initiatives and to launch the debate on “another Europe” across the continent.
Up to now the construction of the EU has been the work of political elites and bureaucracies operating behind the backs of the people, with their decisions periodically validated by national parliaments or less often, by referenda. The breach opened in France and Holland can be the occasion to take the debate on the future of Europe to the working classes and peoples of the continent. The challenge for the anti-capitalist Left and social movements is not to fall back on national isolation but to show that as the global justice movement puts it, “another Europe is possible” – one that will be built by and for workers and people against neo-liberal capitalism.
