Mon, 30 May 2005

The French say "Non"!

Coming back with Rambonabo from the cinema, where I watched Episode III for the second time (this time I didn't pay for the ticket), we learned from the radio the results for the French referendum.

I was pretty confident about "No" winning, and I'm happy to see it was by a quite acceptable margin, given how high participation was. I don't know how the process continues now that a key member has rejected the current text. One would hope France would start pushing for changes in the Constitution with the goal of writing a new version that makes some people that today voted no happy, and that would be voted again. What doesn't sound too "democratic" is what Giscard says needs to be done: to vote over and over and over again until the "Oui" option wins.

I'm still a bit perplexed at Spain's results for the same vote. That did suck a bit. Not only for the final result, but for the overwhelming percentage of votes supporting "Sí" in our referendum. Were the 80% of the (not that many) people who voted informed about what's in the Constitution? Do they know that if they find out a bit later, after it's approved, that they don't really like this or that bit, it's virtually impossible to change it?

02:00 | [] | # | (comments: 3)

"it's virtually impossible to change it"

Uberly false but eh who cares for facts ? The angry mob has voted against Chirac, too bad the constitution was in the middle...

articles IV-444 and 445

Posted by JRM at Mon May 30 09:35:43 2005

Which comes to say, "any change in the Constitution must be done unanimously by the 25 members of the Union". Given how hard was to take any decision unanymously with 15 members, making real changes to this text that involve more social rights or some real environment protection content would be quite difficult, because there'll be always some member that thinks the changes go against their interests.

Posted by Jordi at Mon May 30 10:37:12 2005

"Were the 80% of the (not that many) people who voted informed about what's in the Constitution"

The same question goes to the people that said 'no' on the Spanish poll.

BTW... Here in Spain the government only sent a portion of the Constitutional text, and I must say that text is almost unreadable. But they 'forgot' (or neglected) to send the full Constitution text.

Posted by xavier caballé at Mon May 30 15:05:54 2005