Impact of the French ‘no’ vote

With a vote of 55 percent, the French electorate rejected the proposed European Constitution in a May 29 referendum. This proposal had aimed to write into constitutional law the policy of economic neoliberalism that for years has been defended by right-wing libertarians, in Europe as well as the United States.

Their dream was to equip Europe with a Constitution that, by installing flexible supranational institutions, would deprive national states of the most essential part of their sovereignty, and in turn reinforce the rule of finance capital.

This proposal was heavily promoted by the transnational monopolies, whose managers in France invited the public to vote “yes for a prosperous Europe.”

These included the petroleum concern Total, which reported $10.9 billion in profits in 2004, the highest ever recorded by a French firm, and which is laying off workers on French territory; the cosmetics firm L’Oréal, whose CEO is the highest paid in the country at $7.9 million per year and whose owner is “the richest woman in France” with a fortune of $13.7 billion.

Meanwhile, one of every six French work ers is paid only the minimum wage and 7 million people in France live in poverty.

There is also the machine tools company Schneider, whose shareholders enjoyed the biggest increase in dividends last year—63.6 percent—and which is outsourcing its production. And don’t forget the armaments firm Dassault, which has just bought part of the media. The last-mentioned bombarded the public with “yes” slogans, attempting to manipulate public consciousness and bludgeon them with lies.

The French still said “no.” This “no” vote was along class lines. It is a reminder to the elites that the people exist, that the popular classes resist, and that the world of labor can still be mobilized.

The “no” rallied the votes of 80 percent of production workers, 70 percent of small farmers, 67 percent of white-collar workers, 64 percent of civil servants and more than 50 percent of craft workers, small shopkeepers and intermediate professions. It got the vote of 66 percent of households with monthly incomes less than $1,800, 75 percent of those without degrees and 71 percent of the unemployed. Among those voting “no” were many young people from working-class neighborhoods.

This result was the product of the consciousness, resistance and unity of the popular classes. It was their first victory in a confrontation with neoliberalism since the great strikes of 1995. This “no” was a rejection of those politicians, whether from right-wing parties or the traditional “left,” who over the last 20 years have handed the country over to speculators for plunder.

The French people know how much they lost when the right-wing parties in power carried out a drastic destruction of social services—the pension “reform” under the government of Premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin—but they also have not forgotten that neoliberalism was first implanted in France in 1984 by the socialist government of President François Mitterrand and Premier Laurent Fabius. It is more accurate to call them members of the Socialist Party (PS), a social-democratic and pro-imperialist party, than real socialists.

Alternation without alternatives

Alternating the government between the PS and the rightists, with each of them managing the neoliberal program, provided no real alternative for the workers and poor but only shades of difference in rhetoric. The PS governments wiped out workers’ past social gains, imposing the neoliberal program on trade unions paralyzed from acting against a PS government. This made them as essential to the ruling class as the right-wing parties with their open neoliberalism.

More and more French people became aware that there is a close connection between neoliberalism and U.S. hegemony. Neoliberalism can be defined as the power of finance capital, rule by the owners of capital. And those who dominate internationally are essentially based in the United States. Neoliberal “globalization” was imposed, starting from the United States, especially after the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed, unilaterally increased interest rates in 1979.

The Europe now under construction (without its citizens) is a Europe planned to serve the interests of big West European capital. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this Europe has been trying to turn the economies of the Central and Eastern European countries into subservient subsidiaries. This Europe is market-driven and has been oriented to U.S. imperialism since its origin.

Indeed, after the collapse of the USSR these dominant European forces limited their ambitions to a prudent defense of their interests while remaining subordinate to U.S. finance capital, to its neoliberal-warlike strategy and to the instruments used to enforce its hegemony: NATO for its military component; the Inter national Monetary Fund-World Bank-World Trade Organization for its economic domination.

Europeans did not put up any significant resistance—outside of some speeches at the Security Council of the United Nations, which are already well-known—to the crimes and plunder perpetrated by U.S. finance capital, whose tool is the Bush administration.

In France, it was by a consensus among the PS and the right-wing parties that the Maastricht treaty was adopted for the Common Market in 1992, an example of neoliberalism. This is also how it decided to enter the war against Yugoslavia in 1999, another submission to U.S. policies that is known here as Atlanticism.

Is France really democratic?

This alliance between the dominant classes of Europe and the United States, with which Japan is also associated, is basically directed against the people of the South, including China. They justify it in ruling-class ideology by the democratic values they claim to incarnate. As their post-referendum activity shows, however, bourgeois democracy, as it functions in France, is fictitious.

Almost the entire collection of French traditional politicians supported the Euro pean Constitution. They all were beaten. Yet they all remain in power.

Jacques Chirac remained president with only a 24-percent favorable rating in June 2005 opinion polls. Nicolas Sarkozy is still head of the leading right-wing party (UMP), François Hollande is head of the PS, with a popularity rating of about 35 percent as of now, lower than that of the leaders of the Communist (PCF), Revo lutionary Communist League (LCR) and Workers’ Struggle (LO) parties.

If, for the large majority of the French people, democracy is reduced to a small walk in silence to the polling booth one Sunday every 12 or 18 months, to get into the voting line in silence, to nod one’s head in silence when one’s name is called, to slip an envelope into the ballot box in silence and to go back home in silence with nothing changed, then this democracy is much noise about nothing. The bourgeoisie is in power and has no intention of giving it up. Could it be then that we do not really live in a democracy?

Next: Where is France headed?

Rémy Herrera is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and teaches Economics of Development at the University of Paris—Panthéon-Sorbonne.