- Jon Henley in Paris
Five days to go until the crucial French vote on the EU constitution, yet another clutch of polls (three, to be precise) put the No vote up at 53%, and Jacques Chirac decides to play his ace: the President of the Republic will, his office has announced, make what is known here as "a solemn declaration" to the nation, on both television and radio, at 8pm on Thursday evening.
This is a very different exercise from the two TV appearances he has made to date in the campaign. In the first, he failed utterly to reassure an audience of young people whose concerns for the future focused, admittedly, on almost everything but the constitution. Chirac was finally, and somewhat humiliatingly, forced to conclude: "I have difficulty understanding your fears."
In the second, a live interview, he fared marginally better, managing more or less to hammer home his two key messages: that the treaty does enshrine French values, and that if the French reject it they will a) lose most of their clout within Europe, and b) never be able to negotiate anything better - or at least anything less "Anglo-Saxon".
Neither of these appearances has made enough of an impact on public opinion to reverse, for more than a few days, the prevailing trend. The Elysée Palace insists that the third will: this time there will be no unruly debate, no impertinent questions. Chirac will read a carefully prepared 10-minute text uninterrupted, from behind his desk. He is, in short, throwing the full weight of his presidential authority into the campaign.
Will it be enough? There are plenty of reasons to doubt it.
For starters, Chirac - an opportunist who has never even tried to pretend that Europe should be anything other than an extension of France and of French interests - is hardly very credible when it comes to EU issues.
Second, he is not particularly credible, full stop. Leaving aside all those corruption allegations, which on the whole do not much bother the French, even the most loyal of Chirac backers would be hard-pressed to point to anything concrete he has actually accomplished in his 10 years as president (and 40 years in French politics). The French quite like him; they don't necessarily respect him.
Third, the president's very presence in the Elysée is an affront to many on the left, who were forced to vote for him in the 2002 presidential elections to keep out the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen, and who feel that he has since abused their selfless support to pursue a rightwing programme of economic and social reforms.
Fourth, all the polls show that one of the prime reasons for the groundswell of opinion behind the No vote is that the French electorate is quite simply fed up with its present political class: the same faces, the same names, the same ambitions, the same narrow preoccupations, the same refusal to listen, the same inability to adapt.
On the merits of the constitution, the most popular speakers in France at present are Simone Veil, the widely respected former president of the European parliament; Jacques Delors, the former president of the Commission; and Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, who is seen as removed from the warring clans of the deeply divided Socialist party. In short, the electorate does not want politics.
Chirac's personal approval rating, meanwhile, is now at its lowest point since his disastrous decision to dissolve parliament in 1997. Is he really the best man to persuade a recalcitrant electorate to vote Yes?
- Read Jon Henley's first referendum blog post
