PARIS, March 18: President Jacques Chirac faced pressure on Friday to throw his weight behind France’s campaign to accept the European Union constitution after a poll suggested for the first time a majority could be against the treaty. The poll rang alarm bells at the EU’s executive commission, which called the results “disturbing”. The charter needs the approval of all 25 EU member states and rejection by France would plunge the union into crisis.
Fifty-one per cent of voters who have decided how they will vote in France’s May 29 referendum on the treaty plan to reject it, according to the poll in Friday’s Le Parisien newspaper.
Fifty-three per cent intended to abstain, submit blank ballot papers or have yet to make up their minds about a constitution designed to make the bloc work more smoothly. “It is a real electric shock,” Labour Relations Minister Gerard Larcher told Europe 1 radio. “But I don’t know of any difficulty a man of spirit cannot transform into a victory.”
The poll followed a bitter clash between Brussels and Paris over an EU plan to liberalise its services sector which trade unionists and politicians say could undercut workers’ rights and consumer protection.
The opposition Socialists, which broadly back the charter, urged Chirac to nail his colours to the mast. The president has largely refrained from entering the debate, leaving it to his government to campaign for a ‘yes’ vote.
“Since he is the one who negotiated and signed the treaty, it is up to him to present it and defend it before the French people,” Socialist leader Francois Hollande told LCI television.
“Francois Mitterrand did it at the time of the Maastricht treaty” which brought the EU closer economic and political union, he said, referring to Chirac’s Socialist predecessor. A special opinion polls committee at the Council of State, France’s highest court, sought to calm the atmosphere by issuing a statement cautioning against reading too much into polls that had a small sample and gave no margin for error.
“It (the committee) recalled that interpreting results that show a small difference between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ must be treated with the utmost caution considering the size of the samples that are generally taken,” the statement said.
The CSA institute’s poll was carried out on March 16 and 17 among 802 people aged 18 or more. Results showed a drop from 63 per cent support for the treaty in late February, and 69 percent at the start of September, but gave no margin for error.
France will be the second member state after Spain to hold a referendum. About half the states will hold a popular vote. Others plan to ratify the treaty in parliament. Even with Mitterrand’s personal backing, the Maastricht treaty was passed by only a whisker in France in 1992, partly due to discontent with the government of the day.
There are fears of another public backlash in May as discontent is rife over the government’s cost-cutting reforms, the prospect of the liberalisation of the EU’s services sector and Turkey’s possible entry to the bloc.
“Europe has become a scapegoat for everything,” Julien Dray, spokesman for the Socialist Party, told RTL radio.
The European Commission said it was clear that support for the constitution had been hit by worries about the EU services bill and by “economic and domestic difficulties”. It vowed to do all it could to explain the constitution to voters.
French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said uncertainty was normal and vital for a debate on such a key vote. —Reuters
