Sarkozy aide seeks support for constitutional fix

Across Europe support is growing for the plan put forward by French Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy for salvaging most of the EU constitution.

This involves avoiding a new round of referenda on a renegotiated text by dropping ambitions for Europe to have a constitution. Instead, EU leaders should agree the same reforms set out in the text but argue that they are technical treaty changes which can be ratified by national parliaments.

This consensus is coalescing around the blueprint from Sarkozy, who called in a speech in September for a ‘mini-treaty’, which would take up the main parts of the constitution.

French centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure, one of Sarkozy’s advisers on EU affairs, has been touring European capitals, including Berlin and London, explaining their thinking.

He told European Voice that the premise for Sarkozy’s approach is that any attempt to relaunch the institutional reforms "could not be allowed to fail". This meant that EU leaders had to agree not to hold a referendum on a next text, except in Ireland. The constitution would not be renegotiated as such but there would be an agreement to retain the "heart of the constitution" on which there had been a strong consensus. The text would be remade "with scissors", Lamassoure said, referring to plans to include only the 120 articles which were introduced or changed in the constitution and not the 400 or so articles from preceding treaties in the full constitution text.

He said that many French voters seemed not to have rejected the parts of the constitution designed to enable the Union to function more effectively but rather elements which had been in the treaties since the 1957 Rome treaty such as fair competition, the need to remove obstacles to trade and the free movement of capital, goods and services.

As this would be only an ordinary treaty, there would be no need to "annoy the people" with another referendum, he said.

Lamassoure said that a decision could be taken to launch a new intergovernmental conference in June 2007, at the end of the German presidency of the Council of Ministers. Work on a new text could be concluded under the Portuguese presidency in the second half of 2007, leaving 18 months for a new round of ratifications. This would leave the French presidency in the second half of 2008 free to focus on reform of the EU’s budget, he said.

The MEP said UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had received the ideas "with interest" which increased the need to proceed fast with the plans. He said that contacts with Blair’s likely successor, Finance Minister Gordon Brown, had been "more complex".

Asked about continuing opposition from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a mini-treaty, Lamassoure said that the official German line was still "the constitution, the whole constitution and nothing but the constitution" but he added that with the upcoming presidency, the German government did not want to be seen to be endorsing a particular approach now. He admitted that the question of the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights was divisive as Germany and many new member states wanted strong references to Europe’s religious, that is to say Christian, values. But other countries had reservations about the charter because of concerns that certain passages such as the one on the right to life might be seen as denying abortion rights. These objections could be overcome, he suggested, by allowing some countries to recognise the charter.

One sign that Berlin might be more open to Sarkozy’s plans despite official repudiation comes from Elmar Brok, a senior centre-right MEP close to Merkel. An ardent supporter of keeping the entire constitution, Brok said recently that Part III [containing articles] could be dropped if necessary. He said that he did not back Sarkozy’s mini-treaty idea, stressing the need to keep Parts I and II together. But he said that it could be possible to take a different approach to Part III from the one in the constitution as "85% of Part III was not new". Most of the section’s 90 pages are restating provisions of previous treaties.

There was another sign of this growing consensus last Friday (17 November) when a group of former EU leaders called on the current EU heads of state or government to keep "integrally Parts I and II" while "clarifying the controversial points of Part III, if need be by adding an extra protocol".

Lamassoure rejected the suggestion that Sarkozy was proposing a technocratic fix to a political problem, saying that the mini-treaty would give more power to EU citizens. "But in order to do that, we have to go via national parliaments," he said. "It’s not a way to contradict the people."

Across Europe support is growing for the plan put forward by French Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy for salvaging most of the EU constitution.