French Deliver a Yawn on Shorter Presidential Term

The French sent a sharp signal to their political leaders Sunday that they are out of touch with people’s true concerns by boycotting in record numbers a referendum on shortening the president’s term of office.

The proposal, to cut the presidential term from seven years to five, passed easily, receiving 73% of the vote, official preliminary results showed. But less than 31% of the electorate bothered to turn up to cast ballots on a warm, mostly sunny day across the country.

Virtually the entire political establishment, including neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, had advocated the constitutional change as promising France an increased dose of democracy. But many French saw it as their leaders’ version of “inside baseball”--an issue that concerned only the political class.

For ordinary citizens, there are far more immediate issues, including the high price of fuel that led to a recent truckers strike, one of the world’s heaviest tax burdens and the Jospin government’s plan to extend limited autonomy to the troubled Mediterranean island of Corsica.

The real preoccupations of the French, Communist Party leader Robert Hue declared Sunday night, are “a thousand leagues” from the question put to them earlier that day at the polls. The Communists had called on voters to abstain.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the extreme right National Front, which advocated a “no” vote, said the unprecedented abstention rate was a “gigantic kick in the rear” for France’s mainstream political parties.

Sunday’s low turnout was particularly embarrassing for Chirac and Jospin, who are virtually certain to run against each other in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2002. The political rivals have suffered blows to their stature of late, though it is difficult to tell if the damage will be lasting.

Jospin’s popularity ratings plummeted in the aftermath of this month’s truckers strike, which he handled with a mix of concessions and tough talk.

Chirac, who exercised the president’s constitutional prerogative to call Sunday’s referendum, is facing what might turn into the biggest scandal of a long political career. Before dying, a man who said he served as a pipeline for illicit funds to Chirac’s Rally for the Republic party made a videotape accusing Chirac of heading a kickback system for municipal contracts in the 1980s when he was mayor of Paris. The newspaper Le Monde published the allegations from beyond the tomb last week; Chirac flatly denied them.

For 127 years, the French head of state has served a seven-year term, though it was only with the advent of the imperious Charles de Gaulle and his Fifth Republic in 1958 that the presidency acquired real power.

Sunday’s constitutional modification was the most important since a 1962 referendum instituting election of the president by universal suffrage, but the politicians’ chief miscalculation may have been in boring the French. Both Chirac and Jospin ran short and tepid campaigns in favor of a “yes” vote. Without the usual left-right polarization on issues, millions of voters simply tuned out, said Philippe Mechet, director of the Sofres polling agency.

In a televised address to the country Sunday evening, Chirac vigorously defended his decision to call the referendum. He could have let the country’s parliament pass a law, he said, but believed it was up to the people themselves to settle a question concerning the only official all of them elect.

“It’s for citizens to decide,” Chirac said. “I don’t want a confiscated democracy.”

In 1988, a referendum on a new status for the South Pacific island territory of New Caledonia, for which only 37% of the French showed up at the polls, set the old record for arousing the least voter interest.