FRANCE: Jack Lang is the French Socialist Party's spokesman for its Yes campaign for the European constitutional treaty. During 12 years as minister of culture and education, the smooth-talking, grinning deputy for Nord Pas-de-Calais earned a reputation for stroking the fur of restive teachers and students and growing arts festivals like mushrooms across France.
Mr Lang's enduring popularity is a mystery. An Ifop/Paris Match poll this month shows him to be the best-loved socialist politician, with an 85 per cent approval rating among party sympathisers.
So the official Socialist Party (PS) is lucky to have smiling Jack on its side, but not with the renegade Laurent Fabius, whose No camp threatens the PS with a split on the eve of its 100th anniversary.
There is something theatrical about Mr Lang, especially when he's angry. Without naming Mr Fabius, he tore into opponents of the constitutional treaty at a luncheon with the European Press Club yesterday.
"They act as if France were all of Europe," Mr Lang said. "They want Europe to be one big France. Some of them act like Gallic roosters, purporting to impose their law on others. What arrogance! What pretension! What vanity! They are selling mirages and illusions!"
For a man like himself, "with an international and European spirit, open to the world", the likelihood that France will vote No on May 29th is "fairly painful", Mr Lang said. In almost daily opinion polls, the No vote steadily creeps up. A poll published in Le Monde yesterday said 55 per cent would vote No. And for the first time, a majority (53 per cent) said they believed the No camp will win.
The percentage of undecided voters is still high, Mr Lang noted: "The game is still open. We have five weeks to break through." The Le Monde poll indicated 28 per cent of potential voters have not yet made up their minds.
It was "folly" to call a referendum in France, Mr Lang said. He also blamed members of the convention for calling the treaty a constitution. "They imagined they were in Philadelphia in the 18th century," he grumbled. "Only states have constitutions, and Europe is not a state. Adversaries of the treaty seized on the word 'constitution' to portray this as a life and death struggle, as if it were engraved in stone."
The primary reason the No vote appears to be winning, Mr Lang said, "is outrage against the president and the government's policies. Not only do I understand it; I share it. There was a moral contract between [ President Jacques] Chirac and the people when he was re-elected, and he betrayed it. On the night he won, he said, 'This vote creates an obligation. I cannot act as if it didn't happen.' Then he served only the interests of the privileged. People feel they've been taken for a ride."
The second reason for the high No vote was "the exploitation of the referendum for petty reasons of domestic politics", Mr Lang said. "A lot of politicians couldn't care less about Europe, but they're settling their little accounts, making personal calculations."
In another nameless allusion to Mr Fabius and other anti-treaty socialists like Henri Emmanuelli and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he intoned: "We'll deal with political aspects after May 29th."
Opponents of the treaty are waging a propaganda war, Mr Lang said. "The lies work their way into people's brains. People think they won't be able to get divorced any more. These stories go around the marketplace; that abortion will become illegal and the death penalty will be re-established. Most of all, they say the treaty is 'ultra-liberal', when in fact it's a rampart against ultra-liberalism and the power of the multinationals. It's a protective barricade, a shield against the great powers of the world like the US and China."
Asked what it means to oppose liberalism, Mr Lang said, "Society must not be dominated by trusts and monopolies." But when French opponents say the treaty is "liberal", they mean it will make it easier to pay low wages and fire workers. "That exists with or without the treaty," Mr Lang conceded. "Poland and the new members will be able to do that regardless."
When politicians are losing, they often blame the media. Mr Lang complained that the media watch-dog CSA has distributed radio and television air time unfairly between the Yes and No campaigns. "The media act as if it was 50/50," he said. "The vast majority [ of Socialist Party militants] are for the treaty... It's as if the proponents of the No vote have seized control of the media, with the complicity of the journalists."
What Mr Lang meant was that a majority of registered party members voted Yes in an internal referendum last December. Opinion polls show that 55 per cent of socialist sympathisers are now in the No camp.
"Our sympathisers have been thrown," he admitted. "They've been contaminated, destabilised, shaken."