FRANCE/EU: To show renegade socialists who oppose the European constitutional treaty how isolated they are, the French Socialist Party invited the Party of European Socialists (PES), who hold 202 seats in the European parliament, to shift their quarterly meeting from Brussels to Paris yesterday.
"They said, 'Oh, and by the way, we're holding this big meeting the night before. Why don't you come'?" said Ruairí Quinn, the former leader of the Labour Party and treasurer of the PES.
Before an audience of 1,500 militants, Mr Quinn and 27 other prominent European socialists - "la crème de la crème of the European left", said a former Polish minister - delivered and listened to 35 speeches in four hours.
Except for German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, a Green, and the Czech prime minister, all spoke in French.
John Monks, the British president of the European Trade Union Confederation, noted that in contrast with French unions, some 16 million European trade unionists supported the constitutional treaty.
President of the European Parliament Josep Borrel said French debates were sometimes "perplexing" and admonished the French: "Don't give a kick to your government in the backside of Europe."
At the late-night dinner with French socialist leaders, Mr Quinn suggested they might adapt Labour's slogan from the Nice Treaty campaign - "Fianna Fáil can wait; Europe can't" - to help French voters distinguish between domestic grievances and European stakes.
Mr Quinn's speech at 10.30pm received loud applause. "France is the mother of Europe," he said. "It is inconceivable that she would say No to her children."
Ireland obtained independence in 1921, "but we only got our liberation when we joined Europe in 1973", he added.
The French politicians with whom he spent Wednesday evening and yesterday morning were "sick as parrots" at the prospect of the No vote winning, Mr Quinn said. As the leader of the non-party European Movement in Ireland, he will campaign for a Yes vote. A rejection by France "will just make the mountain more difficult to climb".
At Wednesday night's rally, there was a strong undercurrent of hostility towards Socialist number two Laurent Fabius, who defied the party to campaign for a No vote. "The party has been affronted by Fabius's opportunism," Mr Quinn explained.
Mr Fabius apparently hopes to wins the party's nomination for the 2007 presidential race, but Mr Quinn's French colleagues told him the logic was flawed: "If the No wins, Fabius will have walked all over the party's majority. How can he think they'll hand him the nomination?"
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, like Mr Fabius a former finance minister, is campaigning for a Yes vote. In conversations with Mr Quinn, he portrayed the struggle within the Socialist Party as a long-running civil war between reformers and unreconstructed leftists. The latter now "have the bit between their teeth, and this is their revenge", Mr Quinn observed.
The most simple terms have become "code words". In France, pro-treaty socialists refer to themselves as "social democrats", while anti-treaty members of the party consider themselves pure "socialists" and cannot bring themselves to use the words "social democracy".