What happened with the French referendum is a real tragedy. The best thing about this Constitution is that it existed already and it could have generated an agglutinating and mobilizing force. They would have been times of prosperity. There are still new elections where voters want to give their own government a lesson. All the details of this constitution would have been renegotiable in a common political process.
Rejecting the entire Constitution shows poor common sense. With a right-wing Chauvinist dose and a class struggle speech dose, which has no place here, no Constitution would have been accepted. I think that from now on, the national media should dedicate half of the information to Europe, and the other half to national issues. The majority of the citizens that voted don’t even know for what or against what they did it. I think the problem lies in it.

Elfriede Jelinek
Source
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is the German great liberal conservative newspaper. It has a daily circulation of 380 000 copies. Used as the German business circle reference daily.

« Fataler Denkzettel », by Elfriede Jelinek, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2005.