Eh oui … the French say Merde! to the Euro­pean Con­sti­tu­tion (Gapingvoid).

“Hey Guys, next time you draft a pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion, try to keep it under 1000 words. If you can’t, it prob­a­bly means you haven’t really given it suf­fi­cient thought.”

Shades of grey: The debate started at 10pm on 29 May and won’t sub­side until the next Pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in about 18 months time. Although the ref­er­en­dum asked for a sim­ple Yes / No vote, euro­pean inte­gra­tion involves a slew of non-binary, nego­ti­ated issues between two dozen mem­ber states.

Under-communication, alien­ation and gov­ern­ment inac­tion: So vot­ers felt alien­ated from the process, the Yessers under-communicated dur­ing the cam­paing and with grow­ing gen­eral dis­con­tent at the unchang­ing unem­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion and with no other out­let for expres­sion, the French voted a resound­ing “Non” against an inef­fec­tive gov­ern­ment. In fact, not only was this a veiled vote of no con­fi­dence against the gov­ern­ment, French vot­ers don’t trust greater Euro­pean inte­gra­tion to solve their prob­lems either.

Broad­cast media with blink­ers: The French media is as much to blame as the gov­ern­ment, though, for under­com­mu­ni­cat­ing and for treat­ing the oppo­si­tion as irra­tional and xeno­pho­bic. The fact is, there were many rea­sons to vote no and both the media and the gov­ern­ment should have done more to address each issue independently.

Wait and see: At least the Euro took a hit and the gov­ern­ment got jolted into try­ing to cre­ate jobs. Between the two effects, Villepin hopes to cre­ate 800,000 new jobs within the year (note: this fig­ure is unver­i­fied, I heard it on LCI).

If you believe that, do you also believe in Santa Claus?

In the mean­time, those lucky enough to be able to emi­grate to more acco­mo­dat­ing economies … will do so.

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