Empty seats tell of French apathy about Nice

The empty seats in the French National Assembly on Tuesday night told the story of France's indifference to the Nice Treaty.

The Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, and the Minister for European Affairs, Mr Pierre Moscovici, cut lonely figures as they sat on the front bench to defend the ill-loved agreement. If the debate went on until 3 a.m. yesterday, it was only because of a handful of longwinded opponents.

Yet no one doubts that the National Assembly will ratify the treaty on June 12th. Because President Jacques Chirac and the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, led negotiations together in Nice last December, the Gaullist RPR and Socialists will support it, in a rare alliance of opposition and government parties.

But most of the centre-right UDF will abstain; the treaty does not go far enough towards Europe-building, says its president, Mr Francois Bayrou. And the Socialists' allies on the left - greens, communists and Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement's MDC - are deserting en masse.

Before the end of the month, the treaty will be debated and passed by the Senate, at which point France will have completed ratification.

Neither Mr Vedrine nor Mr Moscovici showed great enthusiasm for the treaty that was concluded with such difficulty last December 11th. The Nice agreement and the French EU presidency had been unjustly criticised, Mr Vedrine said. But all told, "the Nice accord is the best one possible".

The Foreign Minister blamed France's European partners. In its attempts to limit the size of the Commission, for example, Paris "ran up against the intransigence of nearly all of the countries, who want to keep `their' commissioner".

France also wanted to move further on qualified majority voting but could only "take note of the inflexible refusal of certain states, for example, on certain aspects of fiscal policy, some social questions or freedom of movement".

The most impassioned speech was delivered by the former interior minister, Mr Chevenement, the leader of a small left-wing party which earlier campaigned against the Maastricht Treaty. He denounced "the federal super-state that German leaders are offering us".

Instead of fulfilling its dream of democracy and solidarity, he said, Europe had become "the Trojan horse of economic liberalism and globalisation".

Mr Chevenement said the idea of a "federation of nation states" - now supported by Mr Chirac, Mr Jospin and the German Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer - was a contradiction in terms. "It's not an idea at all . . . The conditions for a democratic federation in Europe are not there; there is no such thing as a European people; there are 30 of them," he said.

Germany's new prominence in the European Parliament and German influence over candidate countries in central and eastern Europe meant that "the Europe we are heading towards will be more and more Germano-centric," he added.