FRANCE: French President Jacques Chirac faced fresh pressure yesterday to call a referendum on a new EU constitution, a vote which ex-European Commission chief Jacques Delors said would be vital, but like playing Russian roulette.
"There has to be a referendum, it's not possible to do this any other way," Delors, a French Socialist who was one of the architects of the euro, told Europe 1 radio, adding that the risk was "a bit like Russian roulette".
"If we want to raise people's awareness of Europe, the risk has to be taken," he said, referring to the deadly game of pulling the trigger on a revolver with one chamber loaded.
Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing also repeated calls for a referendum.
He led the arduous drafting of the constitutional blueprint that was put to leaders for final negotiations which led to an accord last Friday.
"It's hard to imagine the president (Chirac) refusing to put the matter to the people, even if he has the right to do so," Giscard told France Inter state radio.
Delors and Giscard were the latest prominent figures to urge Chirac to organise a referendum on the proposed new constitution for the 25-nation bloc rather than ratifying the project solely by parliamentary vote.
Chirac has not said what he plans to do. He told reporters in Brussels after Friday's summit deal that ratification, by whatever route, would take at least a year.
His Elysee Palace office said on Monday it had no more to add.
Lawyers have to comb through the constitution text in a laborious process which could take months, lawyers say.
Last week, Chirac's own political party, the centre-right UMP, also backed the idea of a referendum.
An opinion poll published on Monday showed 66 per cent of respondents in favour of the constitution.
The poll, carried out by the Louis-Harris agency on June 13th, showed 26 per cent of those questioned declined to say which way they would vote.
But Chirac is wary of the problems faced by late French Socialist President Francois Mitterrand when he called a referendum in 1992 on the Maastricht treaty on European economic and monetary union.
That scraped through with a perilously narrow approval margin of 50.95 per cent.
Chirac and British prime minister Tony Blair clashed at the summit in Brussels and Blair secured agreement that fiscal and budget matters be excluded from the plan for a more general rule of decision-making by majority at EU level.
Majority voting deprives countries of veto power.
Delors said Chirac had given too much ground to Blair and questioned London's commitment to the EU. "There comes a time when you have to ask 'do you really want in'," Delors said.
Chirac said at the weekend that Paris would have liked to go further in some areas, but the constitution was good for France and would allow Europe to be more efficient in making decisions and making its voice heard in the world.