THE FIFTH republic has run out of breath, declared François Bayrou, the leader of France’s centrist UDF party last week, after the landmark ‘no’ vote in the referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty. It was a sentiment echoed by Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the parliamentary socialists. ‘This is the end of a political cycle,’ he said. ‘There are parallels with the death of the Fourth Republic.’

The British don’t get the French. This is a civilization we have been fighting against and with for the best part of 700 years. But what animates our nearest European neighbour and makes it so combustible is as much a surprise now as it was when the French Revolution burst upon Europe. Now, two of France’s leading parliamentarians are warning that the political institutions of the French state are bankrupt and that another political convulsion is on the way. And when France convulses, Europe changes. We’d better take notice.

The French Revolution changed Europe for ever; the bankruptcy of France’s political system in the 1930s and consequent French weakness created the opening for Hitler’s armies. Then it was the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 under De Gaulle that allowed successive French Presidents to pursue European integration with such vigour. Without the concentration of power in the President, on which De Gaulle insisted, along with the evisceration of its national assembly, France could not have driven European integration as hard as it did. Where France goes from here will have an impact on all of us.

Every European democracy is suffering from a crisis of democratic engagement and an enfeeblement of political parties, but the rot has gone furthest in France. The presidency, the supposed embodiment of the state, is structurally unaccountable.

When things go well or there is a consensus, the lack of accountability is not exposed. Challenge the system with continuing high unemployment or the need to create a consensus when none exists, as over the treaty, and suddenly its frailty is exposed.

Nor can the National Assembly solve the problem because it is constitutionally weak. It is set up to be cipher of the executive rather than challenge it. As a result, the political parties are even weaker in their capacity to create a national argument and hook up with their political base.

Power sits with the executive nationally - the President - or locally in the mayoralty, with big city mayors being key political actors. Parliament does not provide the political platform from which to build a constituency, launch an argument or build a career.

As a result, the democratic disconnection in France is even more pronounced than in Britain. There’s an understated sense of disaffection and fragmentation; French cafes, for example, no longer seem to bring people together but, rather, they emphasise their separateness. Africans hawk cheap tat in the streets, an unintegrated and unwanted subculture. Brutal new shopping precincts, car parks and roads arbitrarily cut through familiar communities.

French youth culture wants to embrace the latest from Britain or America, but also wants to be French and doesn’t know how. Four years after university, 40 per cent of graduates are still unemployed.

Ariane Chemin, a writer for Le Monde, captured contemporary France perfectly in her piece on Compiègne, a typical commuter town 64 kilometres east of Paris. With the aid of some local estate agents, she plotted the ‘no’ vote against the price per square metre of property, advancing through the town and its outlying villages quarter by suburban quarter.

The correlation between low property prices and readiness to vote no was perfect. The part of town where the Africans were most visible and social housing most evident registered the biggest no vote at 77.24 per cent.

But in Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, the gilded village retreat of Compiègne’s professional classes and Parisian second home-owners, the yes vote was 65 per cent. In the suburbs in between, even with a socialist mayor calling for a yes, the denizens of small, three-bedroom houses voted no by 64 per cent.

This is the France over which President Chirac presides. He and the constitution which confers on him such power is the France of Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, but the rest of Compiègne gazes on in mute disaffection and gathering anger. Its deputy in the National Parliament might as well not exist; its President and the aristocrat Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, speak a language, come from a class and represent a political system that is light years away from their daily experience. Meanwhile, unemployment is ever-present, as high now as it was 20 years ago, and the town in which they live has become a dystopian aggregation of new car parks, soulless shopping malls and aggressive African street vendors. Would you vote yes?

France’s political and economic crisis has been more than a decade in the making. The tiny yes vote for the Maastricht treaty in 1992 was one storm warning; another has been the rise of the racist and xenophobic Jean Marie le Pen as a national figure. Yet another was the balkanisation of the left vote in the presidential election in 2002, so that the run-off was between Le Pen and Chirac, giving Chirac a ridiculous majority.

While corporate France has restructured and raised its productivity to the highest in the industrialised West, easily surpassing the US, the rest of the French economy has been becalmed. There is no dynamic service sector; no lively property market, with all the jobs and rising consumer spending that spin off it; no sustained effort to make the public sector more responsive to citizen’s wants. Above all, there is no sense of forward movement; the pervasive fear is that the future will be worse than the present.

Last week, de Villepin, promising a focused 100-day effort to lower unemployment, proposed some modest reforms to make it easier for small firms to hire new workers. Besides the scale of what has to be done, it’s almost laughable. France has to open up and build its own version of what has worked in Britain and Scandinavia, but it can’t do that without leadership and a proper national conversation.

And it can’t do that without a root-and-branch reform of its political system. Until France resolves its crisis, there will be no movement in developing the EU.

Europe is in new territory. Turkey’s chances of joining the EU are near zero and in Britain, the argument about Europe that has rendered the Conservative party unelectable for more than a decade is over, because French-led European integration is over.

The way is open for a reunited Tory party to challenge for the electoral middle ground, a new political reality for which the British left is wholly unprepared. When convulsion hits France, Europe changes and we’re only at the beginning.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.