France: French supporters of the European constitutional treaty received another shock yesterday when, for the second time in three days, an opinion poll showed most French voters intend to vote No in a referendum on May 29th.
The survey, carried out by the IPSOS polling institute for Le Figaro and Europe 1 radio station, showed that 52 per cent of the French would vote against the treaty, 48 per cent for.
One-third of voters were still undecided. A different poll published on March 18th showed 51 per cent against, 49 per cent for.
The sudden collapse of support for the treaty has sown panic in the Yes camp. France's two largest political parties, the centre-right UMP and the socialists, officially support the treaty.
In his campaign appearances, UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy argues that the EU has guaranteed 60 years of peace and that all that has been accomplished "could be destroyed in a few weeks".
The treaty will provide "a political boss for European policies", Mr Sarkozy said, referring to the creation of a president of the union.
Mr Sarkozy's party is the only one where support for the treaty is rising, from 67 per cent to 70 per cent in the last two weeks.
But the second-largest right-wing party, the UDF, considered the most pro-European French grouping, has seen support plummet from 84 per cent to 61 per cent during the same period. UDF leader François Bayrou has appealed to the president, Jacques Chirac, to make a powerful case for the treaty in a nationwide address.
Mr Chirac's popularity rating has fallen 5 percentage points in one month, to 42 per cent, and his advisers fear that if he campaigns too hard for the treaty, it could have the opposite effect, by driving away left-wing voters who voted for him in 2002 to prevent the extreme right-wing National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen from winning.
Left-wing voters said they would find it difficult to "vote for Chirac a second time".
So much is riding on the referendum that there have even been suggestions that Mr Chirac might be wise to stage a "constitutional coup d'etat" by cancelling the poll and opting for certain ratification by the National Assembly and Senate.
French opposition to the Bolkestein directive on opening up the services sector in the EU has boosted the No camp.
President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso yesterday appealed to French leaders to explain to the public that the directive, which will be hotly debated at the European Council meeting today and tomorrow, has nothing to do with the treaty.
French No voters believe the treaty constitutes a renunciation of the "social Europe" that Paris has always advocated. They see it as a victory for Anglo-Saxon style liberal economics.
But most of the reasons cited by Pierre Giacometti, the head of the IPSOS polling institute, have nothing to do with the actual text of the treaty: demonstrations by lycée students opposing the reform of the Baccalauréat; the publication of record profits by the leading French companies while unemployment has again surpassed 10 per cent; last month's Gaymard scandal in which the finance minister was forced to resign over his €14,000 a month apartment.
The challenge facing the Yes camp is to disentangle the debate on the constitutional treaty from issues such as Bolkestein, and Turkish negotiations for accession. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a socialist leader in the Yes camp, called Messrs Sarkozy and Bayrou "pyromaniac firemen" for saying they were for the treaty but opposed to Turkish admission to the EU.
Mr Chirac is expected to make an impassioned plea for the treaty in his closing press conference in Brussels tomorrow.
He will argue that by voting for the treaty, France will make itself and Europe more powerful, and more able to stand up to the United States.
"That's an argument that works," a source close to Mr Chirac said.
"Talk about freedom and democracy is too vague. During the campaign, we will stress what the positive effects of the treaty will be for specific sectors, such as health and defence."
Panic is even greater in the Socialist Party, which voted last December by a 59 per cent margin to support the treaty.
Yesterday's opinion poll showed that 55 per cent of left-wing voters now intend to reject the treaty.
"Everything is possible, even what we thought was unlikely, even crisis," the leader of the Socialist Party, François Hollande, said.