A POLITICAL REVOLT IN FRANCE --What Rejection of the European Constitution Means (Updated)

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 tireless stumping for a Yes vote by nearly all the major political leaders of left, right, and center --  a scare campaign that tried to (falsely) tell the overwhelmingly pro-European French that they would be responsible for destroying construction of a united Europe if they voted against this anti-democratic Constitution -- the French electorate's working and middle classes, by their No vote, 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 and media 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 and bypass the voters, as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did), has taken a slap in the face from which he cannot recover before the presidential elections of 2007. Right after his two, carefully staged, prime-time TV appearances to campaign for a Yes vote, the No went up several points in the polls each time. Not only is he incredibly enfeebled on the European and world stages, it will now be quasi-impossible for Chirac to 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 from Paris 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 beating of the drums for the Yes by the mainstream media, the No vote would have been even larger. For example, when the largest newsweekly, the mildly-left Nouvel Observateur, ran a cover photo of a finger-ponting, respected former European Commission president Jacques Delors (photo right), with the demagogic headline against the No, "THEY'RE LYING TO YOU!'' the mag's editor, Laurent Joffrin (photo below), rewrote and deformed Delors' words to strenghen their anti-No content -- much to the dismay of some of the magazine's editorial staff, which was quite divided on the referendum. As a result, Delors felt obliged to make a much-publicized declaration that -- contrary to what the Nouvel Obs' article made him say -- there was a "Plan B," a way forward toward a more united Europe even if the Constitution was defeated. This Delors turnabout was a major media victory for the No forces, and it helped persuade a lot of moderate and left voters that they were, indeed, being lied to -- but by the Yes camp and the media.)

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 -- by which he means a break with the mixed economy, and more ultra-conservative, deregulatory 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, Francois Bayrou, for Sarkozy's support of Bush's war in Iraq and hard-right economic policies that also resemble Bush's. But Sarkozy (seen at right as his puppet character on the satirical TV show "Les Guignols"), 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, his sources at the Elysee Palace say the new prime minister will undoubtedly be ex-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin   (the voice of France at the UN against the Iraq war--photo at right), 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) , and former Mitterand Culture Minister Jacques Lang (the most popular left pol in the opinion polls, thanks to his incessant TV appearances (see photo at right) -- 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 in '07, 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) and Senator Jean-Luc Melanchon, leaders of the "Nouveau Monde" tendency within the party -- who campaigned hard for the No against the wishes of their party's executive committee -- finds itself reinforced by today's vote. But neither Emmanuelli 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, number two in the party's hierarchy, who was the target of constant barbs from Hollande and the Socialist leadership during the referendum campaign for breaking party "unity" -- is also reinforced (he had been threatened with expulsion from the party leadership if the Yes had won). But Fabius (photo, left) 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, deregulation, 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. (Fabius was also tried in 1999 for his key role, as prime minister, in the HIV-contaminated blood scandal that killed thousands of French hemophiliacs -- but was acquitted by a politically rigged special court; for an account of his scuzzy role, see my article in POZ on the trial.)

5. Today's vote also is a victory for what is known as "the left of the left" -- 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) ;  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) , 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 -- and with the probable participation of the decimated Communists (now less than 3.5% of the electorate), 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, although the party supported a Yes vote by a narrow majority -- 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 some 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, which disavowed the Pary's adopted Yes position -- the party's left wing includes the moderate-left, process-oriented Nouveau Parti Socialiste tendency led 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, which led the campaign for a "Non socialiste," 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 by the French electorate. If Germany's voters had been given a choice in a referendum, they would probably have voted No as well. However, 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 of a Europe constructed for the benefit of the multinational corporations. Get out the champagne!

2nd UPDATE, MIDNIGHT MONDAY MAY 30: A new IFOP poll out Monday night confirms: 2/3 of the the salaried voted No, and 3/4 of the workers voted No. The No vote was not a nationalist rejection of Europe, but a demand for a a different Europe -- the No's victory was above all motored by an economic vote, as these numbers suggest (a point that appears to have largely escaped today's British dailies, for example). That was clearly expressed in a Monday night debate on France2 public TV by a number of rank-and-file trade union leaders -- but it was a dialogue with the deaf who had supported the Yes, and who were represented by the actor Philippe Torreton and the ex-minister Bernard Kouchner for the left, and the ultraconservative, gay-baiting, closet case Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres (the only minister willing to appear in the debate) for the right. An unacceptable amount of unintelligible, simultaneous yelling in the 90 minute debate gave me a headache. The daily Liberation is reporting in tomorrow's edition that there is enormous resistance to Chirac's naming de Villepin prime minister from the ranks of Chirac's own party (that's their cartoon below, by the way), while Le Monde reports (not surprisingly) that if Chirac picks de Villepin, Sarkozy would consider that a declaration of war. And Le Figaro quotes an anonymous leader of Chirac's party as saying "there isn't one deputy of the majority who supports de Villepin" -- only to conclude that by the end of Monday it was clear that he would, indeed, be the next p.m. On Monday night's France2 news, de Villepin was certainly in a smiling good humor after leaving the Elysee following his meeting with Chirac. The name of the new p.m. will be announced during the morning (says Le Figaro) with the traditional reading of a brief communique from the steps of the Elysee Palace by the presidency's secretary-general (chief of staff), and Chirac will go on TV Tuesday night to explain his choice. If you're a real French political news junkie and want to know the name of the new p.m. as soon as it's announced, you can listen to the all-news France Info radio live,on the 'net, on their website (click on "Ecouter le Direct" at the top of the page.)