[Peace-discuss] French vote

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Best account I've seen of the important vote in France today:
<http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/
the_massive_def.html>. --CGE]

   May 29, 2005
   A POLITICAL REVOLT IN FRANCE 
   What Rejection of the European Constitution Means 
   Doug Ireland

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 by nearly
all the major political leaders of left, right, and center --
 a scare campaign that tried to (falsely) tell the French that
they would be responsible for destroying construction of a
united Europe  if they voted against this Constitution -- the
French electorate's working and middle classes, by their No
vote, Referendum_non 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?")

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 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), has taken a
slap in the face from which he cannot recover before the
presidential elections of 2007. It will now be impossible for
Chirac Jacquechirac_2to 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 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 establishment media's beating of the drums for
the Yes, the No vote would have been even larger.)

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 -- which
means a break with the mixed economy and more
ultra-conservative 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 for
his support of Bush's war in Iraq and hard-right economic
policies that also resemble Bush's. But Sarkozy, 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."

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)Images , and former Mitterand Culture Minister Jacques
Lang (the most popular left pol in the opinion polls, thanks
to his incessant TV appearances--Jacques_lang see photo at
right) both 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, 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)
Henri_emmanuelli_1 and Senator Jean-Luc Melanchon -- who
campaigned hard for the No against the wishes of their party's
executive committee -- finds itself reinforced by today's
vote. But neither Emmanueli 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" -- Pouvoirmed_1 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)Olivier_besancenot_1 ;  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)Jose_bove , 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 --
with the addition of the decimated Communists, 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
-- 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 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 --the party's left wing includes the
moderate-left, process-oriented Nouveau Parti Socialiste
tendency Arnaud_montebourg_1led 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 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 -- and 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. Get out the champagne!

Posted by Doug Ireland at 06:44 PM |