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-Chirac's EU push sways few voters
By Katrin Bennhold and Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune
Saturday, April 16, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/15/news/france.html
Poll finds 'no' vote holding on charter
A high-profile television appearance by President Jacques Chirac failed to turn around opposition in France to the new European constitution six weeks before the country holds a referendum on the issue, according to an opinion poll taken right after the broadcast.
Fifty-six percent of respondents with an opinion said they planned to vote "no" on May 26, a poll conducted Friday by the Paris-based CSA institute showed, in line with 13 surveys over the past month. A third of respondents said they were still undecided.
Among those respondents who watched the president live on Thursday night or talked about his performance with others afterward only 40 percent said they were convinced by his arguments, the poll showed.
The findings, to be published Saturday in the newspaper Le Parisien, may reinforce doubts by senior politicians and observers in France and elsewhere in Europe that Chirac has the authority to convince enough voters to endorse the constitution.
It was hoped that Chirac's live television debate with young people Thursday night would increase support for the new EU charter, but analysts said he was facing a real battle because the vote was increasingly being considered a referendum on the president himself.
The trouble, said Bruno Jeanbart, director of political studies at CSA, is that Chirac's influence among the doubters is limited. Most of the recent rise in those who say they would vote "no" has occurred among leftist voters and not those in his own center-right camp.
"He is not well placed to reverse the 'no' trend," Jeanbart said. "The people he mainly needs to convince are not his electorate. He depends on the Socialist Party to win this vote. It's not a very comfortable position to depend on the opposition."
The president, whose approval ratings have declined sharply recently, has tried from the start to persuade leftist skeptics that the new charter would not lead to a "free-for-all" liberal economic system in the European Union.
Indeed, some, including Jeanbart, derided Chirac - a conservative Gaullist - for trying to come across as a social democrat during his television appearance Thursday night. So far this strategy has not appeared to help. Last month, Chirac lobbied hard to derail a European proposal that was aimed at liberalizing services across Europe and widely unpopular in France, especially among voters on the left.
Despite his victory in Brussels, the "no" camp continued to gain in opinion polls at home.
Chirac's attempt Thursday to sell the constitution and himself as favoring social welfare and public services also failed to have an impact.
Jeanbart said that less than a third of respondents were persuaded by Chirac's arguments on these issues.
CSA polled about 850 eligible French voters on Friday. While the institute does not publish a margin of error, similar surveys tend to have an error margin of 2 to 3 percentage points.
European officials in Brussels welcomed Chirac's attempt to become engaged in the debate, praising his willingness to be criticized so sharply on prime-time television. His bid to separate unpopular domestic issues such as high unemployment and recent attempts to revise the social welfare system from the constitution were also acknowledged.
"It is good to have a debate on the merits of the constitution," said a spokeswoman for the European Commission in Brussels.
Some EU officials, however, questioned how effective Chirac's answers were in explaining the constitutional treaty on Thursday night.
"The questions of the young people were almost more interesting than the answers - they really showed what people are afraid of," said one European official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
"This kind of debate should be used to explain the reality of things and there is perhaps a question mark as to whether that happened."
In Germany, senior politicians were increasingly worried that Chirac's unpopularity would make it difficult to win the vote next month. (of course, there will be no vote in Germany; at least they can vote in France)
"The problem with referenda is that people look at all issues," said Matthias Wissmann, a senior member of the opposition conservative Christian Democrats and chairman of the EU Integration committee in the Bundestag.
"The real issue is the overall discussion about Europe and about its internal policies. There are some European politicians who do not talk about substance and that is very dangerous."
Wissmann said a "no" vote would have far-reaching consequences for the future of the European Union. "If the referendum fails, then the EU will be in a deep crisis that will affect the future scale of the EU, the substance of the EU and the integration of the EU," he said.
Chirac's difficulties are also being closely watched in the EU's East European member states, which joined the union last May. Pawel Zwieboda, head of the EU department at the Polish Foreign Ministry, said his country would find a French "no" vote very difficult to take.
"France is one of the founding fathers of the constitution; the Polish people would be very surprised if France then rejected it," he said.
In Britain, the other large EU country where a "no" vote is a real possibility, Chirac's television appearance was reported but was largely overshadowed by the current British election campaign. Some commentators took a radically different view from those expressed in most of Continental Europe.
The Times of London doubted that the French would actually reject the charter. It also cast doubt on whether the EU would be worse off without a constitution. "A French 'non' could be the making of the EU," one commentator in The Times declared.
At the introduction of the Labour manifesto on Wednesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair said the government would vote for a "yes" to the constitution in Britain's own planned constitutional referendum, expected to be held sometime in the first half of 2006.
But Blair has so far not taken a leading role in campaigning for a "yes" vote, instead avoiding questions about Europe in a political climate in Britain that is skeptical of further European integration.
The French have shown broad opposition to EU treaties in the past. In 1992, they voted in favor of the Maastricht Treaty, which paved the way to the euro, but only by a razor-thin margin of one percentage point.
At the time, a television appearance of President François Mitterrand two weeks before the referendum appeared to help: the first opinion poll taken after his appearance showed 55 percent in favor of the treaty, after preceding surveys had given the edge to the "no" camp.
