FRANCE: Pascal Perrineau, a professor at "Sciences Po" and one of France's leading political scientists, says the country's "soft consensus" on European integration melted two months ago "in a confluence of economic and social malaise".
French purchasing power fell just as unemployment passed the symbolic 10 per cent threshold. French media publicised the multi-million euro salaries paid to business executives, while the Ile-de-France lycée kick-backs trial and the resignation of finance minister Hervé Gaymard strengthened the public perception of corruption in the political class.
But hostility to the May 29th constitutional treaty referendum reversed at the end of April. Perrineau says advocates of the treaty "woke up and realised it wasn't enough to tell people to vote Yes; they had to give positive reasons, and they had to find men and women to represent their cause."
Because of his Eurosceptical past, President Jacques Chirac was not an appropriate leader for the Yes campaign, Perrineau says. Chirac originally opposed Spanish and Portuguese admission to the EU, so it is ironic that he now uses their success as an argument for the constitutional treaty.
The Yes camp found its leaders in the older generation of French Europeans: Simone Veil, the first woman president of the European Parliament; Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission; and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who presided over the convention that drafted the constitution.
French voters have been swayed by three arguments, he says: "L'Europe puissance", or France cannot exert influence on her own but can exercise power within a powerful Europe; "L'Europe protection" - the idea that Europe protects its citizens from the ravages of globalisation; and the realisation that the treaty is needed to transform Europe from a mainly economic body into a political entity.
Within the French electorate, the Christian democrat and socialist camps were always the bedrock of support for European integration. The former have rallied to the constitutional treaty, but the socialists defaulted. The Socialist Party (PS) is still split roughly in half, and socialist voters will determine whether the treaty passes in France or not.
At the extremes, the No vote is "vertiginous" and will not alter, Perrineau said. More than 93 per cent of French communists, and 97 per cent of National Front (FN) supporters, will vote No.
Chirac is not well placed to convert wayward socialists to the Yes vote. And there is a serious problem of leadership within the PS. "It's the job of the party leader, Francois Hollande, to convince them," Perrineau says.
Under Hollande, the party won regional, departmental and European elections last year. But Hollande "has reached his limit; he doesn't know how to make himself respected". Perrineau argues that Hollande should have expelled Henri Emmanuelli, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Laurent Fabius ("the most cynical politician in France") when they violated PS rules by campaigning for a No vote after a majority of members said Yes.
Hollande was restrained by former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was conciliatory to the renegades in the hope they will support him in the 2007 presidential race.
The PS is on the verge of implosion, because each of the "currents" within the party has become what Perrineau calls a "presidential stable", whose sole purpose is to promote the candidacy of its leader for France's highest office. The left used to be riven by ideological differences, but "whatever debate there is today is a mere fig-leaf for manoeuvring by would-be presidential candidates. There are too many crocodiles in the pond."
The past decade has seen the return of l'exception francaise, Perrineau said. Unlike the British, German and Spanish socialist parties, the French PS never adapted to the free market and globalisation. On the right, Chirac portrays the constitutional treaty as "a rampart against ultra-liberalism and imperialist America" and tries to convince voters that "Europe is becoming like France".
With the exception of the centre-right leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, no French politicians call for change. But a significant portion of French voters will vote Yes because they believe that Europe will force France to make the changes she is incapable of carrying out alone. "They believe Europe is the 'ministry of the future' which is lacking in France," explains Perrineau.
At the heart of the exception Francaise, Perrineau concludes, is a political culture that always jolted back and forth between radical alternatives. "Europe is about parties taking turns in power, about compromise," he says. "The French do not understand a culture of compromise."
Two-and-a-half weeks before the referendum, close to one-third of French voters are still undecided, and opinion polls indicate the Yes and No votes are running neck and neck. Perrineau believes the Yes vote is "structurally in the majority" and will win if advocates of the treaty mobilise sufficiently to stiffen France's "soft consensus" on Europe.