The battle over sovereignty
Sam White
With six months still to go before voting day, the election campaign for the first directly elected European Parliament is already in full swing in France. Contrary to all expectations it is proving to be both vigorous and highly diverting. That this is so is largely due to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who the old day slipped a banana skin under the heels of President Giscard on which the unfortunate man is Still skidding. Why he should have done this to his old friend, knowing full well the difficulties Giscard was having with his own Prior ters on the subject of direct elections, is something of a mystery. But the effect has been to produce elation in the a..nti-direct election camp and something like dismay among the supporters of the Project.
What Schmidt said was that a directly elected body at Strasbourg will not be con,tent with the limited powers conferred on it Dy the Treaty of Rome but will inevitably seek to enlarge them. This has been the theme song all along of the leading Gaullist Debre, and he immediately hailed Sehrnidt's words as striking confirmation of his Own worst fears. The Chancellor's comment also touched off a cross-fire between France's four major Political formations — Gaullists against Giseardians, Communists against Socialists. The fact that it was a German who was caught out stating the obvious did not help Matters either. The Gaullist leader, Jacques Chirac, spoke with heavy irony of 'our dear ally' and Marchais for the Communists rubbed in the fact that it was not only a German speaking but 'Mitterrand's Social-Democratic friend'. So far supporters of direct elections have been content with reiterating the Rome Treaty's stipulation that any enlargement of the European Parliament's powers would have to be approved by a unanimous vote of the member countries — in short that the veto would apply and that such a parliament could not of itself assume increased powers. Now clearly a stronger line was called for, and this was provided by the Prime Minister M Barre in a speech last Sunday. He said that not only would a proposal for greater powers for the Strasbourg Assembly have to meet with the approval of the French government, but that it would in any case have to meet with the approval of parliament and, in the last analysis, if it touched on constitutional issues — as it almost certainly would — it would also have to be approved by a referendum. Far from lowering the temperature Bane's speech raised it. This is because having for so long insisted that there is no risk involved in a directly elected European Assembly diluting French sovereignty, it has now for the first time admitted that such a risk exists. Furthermore, taking courage from either Schmidt or Barre, or both, some government spokesmen are now saying that it may well be desirable at some point in the future to widen the powers of the Strasbourg Assembly if only to ensure democratic control over the ever growing Brussels bureaucracy. The debate is therefore likely to get more acrimonious rather than less — especially as Gaullist fears are now thoroughly roused on two major fronts. Firstly, externally, the Gaullists feel themselves more and more isolated in Europe and, internally, they suspect that Giscard will use the European elections as a means of restructuring his majority. Iron ically enough the Gaullists now feel that the British are their only allies against the possibility of a supranational Europe but they are uncertain if this will remain the case if the Labour government is replaced by a Tory one. As for Giscard's domestic intentions, they see him using the European issue both as a means of splitting their own ranks and of hastening the transformation of the French Socialist Party into a SocialDemocratic one. One of the possible reasons, incidentally, for Schmidt's gratuitous remarks about the powers of a future European Parliament was probably to deepen still further the split between Socialists and Communists in France. To revert to the Gaullists, however, an interesting point of view is that of Couve de Murville who, as De Gaulle's foreign minister, speaks with special authority. He considers the quarrel over the European Parliament a false one because, if the French do as the British propose to do and forbid double membership of both the European and the national parliaments, then the European one is bound to become little more than a talking shop and its election will be marked by massive abstentions.
However the fact remains that no party can afford to ignore these elections or to adopt a lukewarm attitude towards them. This is especially so in France where, in contrast to the domestic system of constituency representation involving in most cases two rounds of voting, the European one will be on the basis of national lists and proportional representation. This means that parties can dispense with alliances and give the clearest possible picture of their real strength in the country. The result will be an especially vigorous campaign which in itself should serve to reduce abstentions. It is a prospect which does not particularly beguile either the Gaullists or the Communists but there is nothing they can do about it. The Gaullists could have joined a kind of 'national' list as they were invited to do — the list would have been composed of both Gaullists and Giscardians — and thereby escaped giving a clear picture of an almost certain drop in their vote. They could not accept this, however, because their only hope of preserving their identity is to accentuate their differences with the government, which they technically support, rather than blur them.
As for the Communists, it seems certain that they will lose heavily and some observers think that they will poll as little as 18 per cent of the vote, which will be their lowest score since before the war. Some people are already smacking their lips at the possibility of clashes in Strasbourg between the French and Italian Communists — for of course the Italian Communists are now fervent Europeans. I think they will be disappointed. There is, on the contrary, every likelihood that before the European Assembly meets the Italian Communists will have watered their European wine. In short they will be brought to heel and on Europe will toe the French Communist line: which is, of course, Moscow's too.
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