PARIS: If a referendum were held today, there is increasing doubt that the French and their political leaders would be ready to support the enlargement of the European Union to 25 countries. Instead, the French and their leadership seem increasingly to feel that France and the EU has been paying too much attention to ex-eastern Europe and not enough to the southern hemisphere where France has had long historical ties, notably with Africa.

As for the French National Assembly, its specialist on the European Union, Pierre Lequiller, a prominent deputy and member of President Jacques Chirac’s ruling UMP political party who’s in charge of drumming up support among the French and his fellow deputies for the eventual expansion of the EU to 25 members, says that he’s “preoccupied” over the question, and “highly pessimistic” as to whether the process will be allowed to follow its course.

Lequiller was in Paris on Tuesday to receive the ambassadors from the 10 countries that are supposed to eventually join the EU, and told them that for the moment there was little support in France for the acceptance of their countries as new members of the EU.

Only last week, former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing created a stir in Brussels by stating that he was adamantly opposed to the inclusion of Turkey in the new European Union.

According to a poll last month by the European Commission in Brussels, 47 per cent of the French said they were opposed to the enlargement, with only 40 per cent saying they were in favour.

More troubling perhaps, at least in the estimation of Lequiller, was the revelation that 80 per cent of the French respondents said they were “ill-informed or totally ignorant about the enlargement procedure or its consequences.”

As for French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, he thinks, for his part, that the EU should perhaps start thinking more about turning its attention towards the southern hemisphere once again where France has had important historical links, notably with Africa, and where her relations had in recent years largely cooled off.

Meeting with Morocco’s Mohammed VI on Oct 31, de Villepin affirmed that “Europe should think of developing its imaginative efforts with regard to all of the countries of the region,” and that France’s particular effort would take the form of serving as a “bridgehead” (tete de pont) between Europe and North Africa in general, and Morocco in particular.

He noted that he agreed with Moroccon monarch according to which “our relations with the European Union might be less than adhesion, but certainly more than (a simple) association.”

The French Foreign Minister further remarked that regional economic integration of the Maghreb as a whole — Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, but also perhaps Libya, with which France has just renewed its economic relations — was a “necessity,” as was further development of the “Euro-Mediterranean” partnership which in turn could very well serve as an appropriate “stimulus” for further integration of Northern Africa.