EU: Daniel Cohn-Bendit doesn't think much of the Irish Green Party. "They're going to say No; I'd put money on it," predicts the German Green MEP, who first came to fame as a student leader in 1968 and who is campaigning in France for the European constitutional treaty.
"They've got the Attac hard drive." Attac is the French anti-globalisation movement, whose members have pelted Cohn-Bendit with eggs and tomatoes and held up placards saying "Liar" at his campaign rallies.
Cohn-Bendit calls Attac "the hard-drive of the opposition to this treaty". He says their discourse can be summarised as: "We're for co-operation and solidarity." That's great, Cohn-Bendit continues. "But what does it mean? That all brands of automobiles will co-operate? That there will be no more competition, only one kind of car? What type of society exists if there's no competition?"
The European Green Party met Irish colleagues in Dublin, Cohn-Bendit recalls. "They say exactly the same things as Attac; that the constitutional treaty is not social, that it enslaves Europe to Nato - when it says explicitly that the neutrals are neutral and those who are in Nato are in Nato - and that we'll develop the civil and military defence capabilities of Europe."
For Cohn-Bendit, the rejection of the treaty by Irish Greens would mean betrayal of the Greens' ideology and acceptance of US hegemony. "The text puts prevention of conflict on a par with military capability," he explains. "And the prevention of conflict is at the heart of the Greens' foreign policy."
Greens who, like Cohn-Bendit, defend a military capability for Europe, learned from the Bosnian experience in the 1990s, he says.
"Srebrenica proved that a UN presence is useless if they don't protect people. When the French and the English finally stopped supporting the Serbs, and the Germans stopped supporting the Croats, and people understood that the Bosnians were the victims, we had to put together an intervention force quickly.
"It took Mount Igman and sent ambulances to Sarajevo; nothing more. To stop the massacres, we had to call in the Americans.
"Do we want an autonomous, independent Europe that is capable of preventing concentration camps in Europe on its own? Or do we want a world run by the Americans because they are the only ones who have the means? If you say No to a European military capability, you're saying Yes to US hegemony."
On environmental questions, the Greens' raison d'être, the treaty also makes sense, says Cohn-Bendit. "Environmental policy has been the strong point of the treaties until now. This constitution reinforces that, because it strengthens the European Parliament, which has always gone farther in environmental policy than national parties on a national level."
Cohn-Bendit has called himself "French by birth, Jewish by accident and German by nonchalance." From 1994 until 1999 he was an MEP for the German Grünen; from 1999 until 2004 for the French Verts, and since last year, again a German MEP.
He swears this is his last election campaign: "I'm fed up. I want to do something else with the last 25 years of my life."
"Danny the Red", as he was known during the May 1968 student revolt, made the transition from student anarchist leader to European federalist. In the course of a two-hour lunch with the European Press Club, he spoke flawless French, German, English and Italian. His mobile telephone plays Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the European anthem.
To the French, Cohn-Bendit is more than an ordinary MEP. When he became the head of the French Greens' list in 1998, Le Monde said: "Daniel Cohn-Bendit is one of the rare personalities not from show business who are etched in the collective memory of a whole generation.
"He is living proof that we were once young, in a period whose distance has slowly faded most of the faces, as on an old photo, except his."
At first meeting, Cohn-Bendit seems a banal, short, pot-bellied 60-year-old. But his charisma quickly takes over. Journalists call him by the familiar "tu", a rarity in this formal country. "I was always a groupie," gushes a Spanish woman correspondent.
The French far left, who have repeatedly disrupted his rallies, do not share the sentiment.
"It is a cruel disappointment for those who have not followed his trajectory to discover what he has become: a good liberal integrated in the institutions," spokesman for the Communist Revolutionary League Alain Krivine told Le Monde.
In Cohn-Bendit's defence, his fellow Green MEP Jean-Luc Benhamias said the former revolutionary "represents the most horrible thing about the reformist left: the acceptance of realism".
Cohn-Bendit is as hard on the French as he is on the Irish Greens. "The No camp, and a part of the Yes camp, cannot conceive of Europe other than according to their French model," he says.
"This is the case of the right-wing sovereigntists and the left-wing No, who want a social French Republic.
"I call them post-modern Napoleons," Cohn-Bendit continues. "Napoleon's idea was to impose the republic on Europe through military power. The post-modern Napoleons are vaunting the French-style secular republic as the only possible model for Europe.
"The basic proposition of the social republic is that if Europe isn't the way we want it, we'll block it. We'll renationalise politics. It's a return to (the socialist victory in) 1981."
France's debate on the constitutional treaty has the merit of forcing the French left to define what they mean by "market economy" and "social market economy", Cohn-Bendit says.
Because French socialists were permeated with communist ideology, "they evolved walking backwards with a guilty conscience. When it came to the market economy, the French left were like men who went to bordellos. It was done, but it wasn't talked about." The greatest danger of a French No on May 29th, Cohn-Bendit says, would be "the spiral of disintegration".
He quotes the French philosopher Edgar Morin saying nothing is irreversible. "European integration is not irreversible," he warns. "If people are dissatisfied, the pressure to fall back on the French social model will be very strong."
A new poll yesterday showed 53 per cent of French people who have decided how to vote oppose the treaty, slightly more than in polls earlier in the week. A Dutch survey showed opposition rising in the Netherlands which has a similar vote on June 1st.