The French welfare state is good but unsustainable in the modern world

Martin Kettle

A crisis? Sure. But which one and whose? As the results sank in on Sunday night, the clever men in suits on France's TV5 reeled off plenty to choose from: a European crisis, a domestic crisis, a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of institutions. The French chatterati may disagree about the political meaning of the no vote on the EU constitution, but they were in no doubt that it had provoked multiple crises.

In Britain we are already neatly slotting the French result into our own predetermined categories too. A crisis for Blair was the Daily Mail's all too predictable verdict. There will be echoes of that on the reflexively anti-Blair left, too. A crisis for the European Union was the Telegraph's no less unsurprising view, though admittedly this time with slightly more justice than on the several hundred other occasions it has drawn this conclusion during the past 20 years.

The real crisis is not in London, nor even in Brussels, though both are naturally affected by the drama. The real crisis is in Paris. The people who voted on Sunday were not the British, nor the Europeans, but the French. This is a French crisis, and the tough questions it raises are about France. France's 55%-45% verdict on the EU constitution is not the end of the story, but its beginning. The detail of the vote is illuminating. There was an almost complete convergence against the treaty between the voters of the extreme left and the extreme right; according to the Ipsos exit poll, fully 98% of communist voters voted no, along with 94% of the non-communist extreme left - but also 93% of National Front voters.

The more moderate parties of right and left were more divided. There was generally solid support for the treaty among Jacques Chirac's UMP, where 80% voted yes, and in the centre-right UDF, with its 76% yes vote. But it was among Greens and, especially, Socialist voters where the divide was deepest and had greatest impact. In both parties, the hierarchy called for a yes but a majority of their electorate voted no, replicating the national picture almost precisely. The French crisis, in other words, is not only a national crisis, but also a Socialist one. French Socialist voters divided 44% yes against 56% no. This was the decisive political dynamic of the May 29 outcome. It was what made the difference in the overall result. And, by taking their stand alongside the protectionists of the extreme right and the extreme left, the majority of France's Socialists declared their identity to be with the past not the future, with the nation state rather than the globalised world.

True, they did this for all kinds of reasons that cannot be easily separated out. Some did it to oppose globalisation. Yet many did it because they dislike Chirac, resenting having had to cast a vote for him against Le Pen three years ago. Others wanted to protest because for a decade there has been 10% unemployment in France. Some voted no simply because they actually dislike the EU constitution, though some thought it too strong, while others thought it too weak. Others voted no because they want to stop Turkish accession to the EU.

Whatever their motives, this was a vote to keep tight hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. It was the politics of Peter Pan, of not wanting to grow up. True, in many respects what the French have got is very good - short working hours, generous welfare benefits, subsidies to privileged sectors of the economy, a health service to envy. But it comes at a very high price of persistent high unemployment (one in four young people in France is now out of work), faltering economic growth, a relative decline in income per head and a two-tier labour market of haves and have-nots. The leftwing part of the no coalition should not be allowed to ignore or play down the presence of the rightwing part of their alliance. For what is striking is not the difference between the left and the right, but the identity. For right and left alike, the no vote was a vote in favour of France for the French. In this campaign, protectionism and anti-immigrant feeling were consenting bedfellows.

Jacques Chirac is the principal victim of this embittered result. But he is also, in some respects, its principal author, too. No important political leader in western Europe has made less effort to adjust to change. None has been so determined to finesse the difficult realities of the post-cold war world. Whether he is appeasing despotic regimes, resisting reform to global trade or exploiting anti-American feelings, Chirac has a remarkable record of taking the backward-looking, and ultimately the wrong, option.

Faced with defeat, Chirac seemed to have nothing to say except platitudes about the difficulty of defending France's national interests. It was the speech of a politician who is out of touch and has led his country up a blind alley. The contrast with his UMP party leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, who went on television a few minutes later, was total. The no vote, Sarkozy said, was a message to France to break with its opposition to change, with its fears and its habits, and to move the country on. The French social model, he added, was unrealistic. Chirac may be the official leader, but it was Sarkozy who offered leadership to France on Sunday.

There is nothing worth celebrating in Sunday's result. But there is a very real prospect - with the next presidential election just two years away - that Chirac will again draw all the wrong lessons. He could declare Sunday's no vote to be a vote against globalisation and reform that requires a "core" group of EU nations (led, inevitably, by France) to pull up the drawbridge to protect the French social and political model - a kind of ex post facto vote against enlargement. Polish plumbers, British politicians and Turkish and other Muslims will not be wanted on this voyage. But there is a danger that some weak political leaders in some other founding nations of the EU could be induced to go along with it.

If this is the route down which the president tries to take France and Europe, so be it. Two things, though, need to be said. First, that it will trigger a necessary Europe-wide argument about how to come to terms with the spread of global market economics while providing support for those most at risk. And, second, that Chirac's attempt will fail sooner or later anyway. There is no place for British or Blairite triumphalism in any of this. In many ways - the poor quality of our public services and the coarseness of our public life - we are no more a model for the organic development of the European Union than France is. Meanwhile Blair, who might once have been the model leader for a continent in transition, has thrown much of his credibility overboard on Iraq. If France has questions to answer about economic modernisation, we have unsolved questions of our own about social justice and protection. But at least we are facing the future, which is more than can currently be said of France.

Tuesday May 31, 2005; The Guardian

martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk