Jon Henley in Paris
Four days to go and the yes camp is beginning to look resigned to defeat in Sunday's French referendum on the EU constitution.
Jacques Chirac met regional newspaper hacks yesterday and apparently gave the strong impression he thought the game was up; Nicolas Sarkozy (the only man who stands to benefit whatever the result) is widely reported to be quipping: "The referendum? It'll be a small no... or a big no."
The interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, is no longer denying that all the information coming in from the government's eyes and ears in the provinces, the prefects, is confirming the polls, of which 10 in succession have now put the no camp ahead on up to 53% of the vote.
And the ruling centre right's response to this dismal state of affairs - apart from wheeling out the president for one last salvo - is starting to come through loud and clear: it's the left's fault. We've done our job, is the line; there's no more market share to be grabbed on the right. It'll be the left's voters who will decide the outcome of the referendum.
For once, the French right is more or less right. All the polls show the centre right electorate, those who habitually vote for Chirac's UMP party and its ally, Giscard's UDF, to be firmly behind the constitution; pro-treaty support on the moderate right is up at 80% or 82%.
On the left, it is a different story. Leaving aside the far left - the communists, the revolutionary communists and the Trotskyists - who are rock solid no voters, the opposition Socialist party is deeply, possibly fatally, split and many of its traditional voters are still not sure which way they will swing on Sunday.
The latest polls show 53% or 54% of Socialist voters plan to vote no. But only 60% of the Socialist electorate say their intentions are absolutely sure; 13% say they could yet be persuaded to change their minds and fully 27% say they have not yet decided one way or the other.
At the Socialist HQ in the rue de Solférino, the party's pundits reckon that if just 10% of those wavering and undecided leftist voters can be won over - maybe a mere 200,000 people - it would be enough to swing the referendum result by the two or three points that would make the difference between defeat and victory.
That explains why Socialists have once again turned to their former leader and prime minister, Lionel Jospin, who popped up on the telly again last night to give one of his cool, calm and deeply didactic (not to say professorial) talks on why a yes vote was the only responsible course of action for a genuine leftist.
The theory is that Jospin carries a kind of moral weight with a whole bunch of Socialist voters because it was they who ensured, by voting instead for an absurd array of no-hoper far left protest candidates, that he got knocked out on the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. Had he had those 200,000 votes, Jospin rather than Le Pen would have been into the run-off.
But there is no particular reason to suggest that those on the left who declined to listen to, or vote for, Jospin in 2002 will do so now. Their choice will depend more, according to the pollsters, on whether their personal experience and situation prompt them to see Europe as an opportunity or as a threat, a magnificent and improving adventure or a Trojan horse for globalisation.
And that is where the French Socialist party has its biggest problem. It is still torn between a modernist, social democratic (or even Blairite) vision and the traditional, immutable tenets of the Gallic left. Still fundamentally uncomfortable with all notions of the market, it is proving incapable of reassuring its historic electoral base of anything, let alone of the merits of the EU constitution.
In this debate, it is the dissident Socialists, notably the idealistic and persuasive Henri Emmanuelli and the clever if cynical Laurent Fabius, who have set out to reconquer what are known here as "les couches populaires". At present, they are doing a very good job. And that means that on Monday May 30, the French Socialist party will finally be forced to decide what it is and who it represents.
