What is happening in France today with the referendum on the European Constitution is certainly not a specific French issue but it has a very specific French dimension: the obsolescence of its political elites regarding the European project. Indeed it is not only a French political crisis because it is already impacting on the whole of the European Union,
generating a new ‘wave’ of interrogations regarding the Constitution project and, more deeply, the current state of the EU political system. Meanwhile, all those who are used to travel and debate all around the Union know very well that citizens’ trust into their national political elites has become extremely low. Therefore those components of the current French political crisis are not specifically French.

What is on the contrary genuinely French is the fact that since the earliest stage of the European construction process, the French political and administrative elites (which used to be of two different kinds, and have now become one single Parisian cast) pretended to embody the true intellectual engine of the European integration dynamics. At least, they made their citizens think so! And, to be true, all along the past 5 decades of European construction, with leaders like Schumann, Monnet, De Gaulle, Giscard, Mitterrand or Delors, they indeed displayed some of the most remarkable players of the ‘EU political champions’ league’, able to put on the European negotiations table both visionary contents and political will.

Today’s French crisis about the EU Constitution comes from the very collapse of the credibility of the French elites on the European project. French citizens are discovering, to their great dismayal, that the only thing left of their elites’s pretention is arrogance! Those
elites are unable to credibly answer any question about the future. No vision at all. And, in a country like France, which has always required a common project to feel alive and unified, this is the ultimate weakness any ruling elite cannot afford to show.

When people started to understand, about two months ago, that their current political leaders could not answer their legitimate questions about the Constitution and the EU because they simply did not understand anything about it, the trend was set on a collision
course between them and the elites. This feeling crosses political as well as generation boundaries. And it is gaining momentum, whatever pollsters are asked to make their surveys look like.

The highly probable ‘No’ vote in France on May 29th will therefore not be the consequence of a French opposition to the EU; but on the contrary, will express the deep conviction of the French people that their political class has betrayed both their trust and the responsibilities they had to push forward the European project. And it is not an attitude turned towards the past, seeking to be the ‘Grande Nation’ again; not at all, as one can see from the very negative reactions to President Chirac’s last TV show when he claimed that France has made no compromise for this Constitution. Such a ridiculous remark was seen by many in France has the ultimate proof that the country’s leadership is out of touch with both French and European realities. How do the people know that?

Because in the past 10 years, like in most EU countries, a growing part of the French population has learned to cooperate/work with other Europeans.

Whether it happens within their companies, their universities, their NGOs, their local authorities, … , the fact is that on a daily basis, hundreds of thousands of French people do work now within a trans-European environment, and, as a consequence,
have discovered that the way their politicians talk of Europe is showing that
they simply do not know how it works.

French political elites are discovering, maybe a bit earlier than other European countries’ elites, that their citizens have now become much more demanding when it comes to European politics than they were a decade ago. Unfortunately, the politicians have not changed.

Therefore we can see in France today a flurry of meetings triggered by the collapse of the French elites’ monopoly on the European debate, which are taking place without any political class representatives.

The French have now become the European citizens with the most exhaustive knowledge on questions related to the EU and its future. A very promising field for nurturing future European political players, especially as
it seems that in this country, the European political debate is slipping away from the hands of its national political class.