Chirac And Schroeder Get Their Own

George Bush: re-elected. Tony Blair: re-elected. John Howard: re-elected. Meanwhile the two outstanding opponents of the Anglo-American anti-terror alliance, Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac, are in the pangs of the most humiliating defeat and repudiation in recent European politics. Who says there's no justice in the universe?

Schroeder's Social Democratic party this weekend suffered a crushing defeat in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany's biggest and for many years a Social Democratic bastion. Chirac meanwhile is confronting a likely defeat in the May 29 referendum on the European Constitution.

Schroeder had won his first election in 1998 as a Tony Blair-like reformer and modernizer, who could haul Germany's troubled economy into the Information Age while preserving Germany's treasured social insurance system. Six years later, the number of unemployed has risen from four million to five million, and year after year the German economy has performed worse than any other that uses the Euro currency.

As the German economic situation has worsened, Schroeder has responded by careening wildly from one policy idea to another.

First he tried to rescue the German economy by rededicating Germany to European integration. In 2002, Schroeder presided over the abolition of the Deutschemark and its replacement by a new currency, the Euro.

When the change of currency failed to yield results, Schroeder tried some market-oriented reforms, proposing reductions in pensions and welfare in 2003.

That didn't help either. So Schroeder tried one more trick, this time veering off to the hard ideological left. In an April, 2005, speech to a Social Democratic conclave in Berlin, the chairman of the party, Franz Muntefering, fixed the blame for Germany's problems on "the growing power of international capital." He called foreign investors a "plague of locusts" descending upon Germany. Schroeder chimed in a couple of days later, attacking the "unrestrained neo-liberal system." At the end of the month, the magazine of one of Germany's most important unions, IG Metall, put on its cover a cartoon of a bloodsucking mosquito wearing the Stars and Stripes.

Unhappily for Schroeder, but happily for Germany's friends, the North Rhine Westphalia voters have decisively rejected Schroeder's ugly tactics and his reckless party -- and it looks likely that the rest of the country will follow them in federal elections next year.

Across the border, another political opportunist is meeting his deserved fate. The European constitution was very much a French project. The convention that drafted it was presided over by former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who often described himself as the "Thomas Jefferson of the European Constitution." (With fine French hauteur, Giscard never felt enough interest in the U.S. Constitution, the world's oldest continuous written constitution, to notice that Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the document: He'd been serving as ambassador to France during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.)

As for the document itself, it too is very French. It is lengthy, subtle and not at all what it seems. It promises to hold the unelected European commission (Europe's real executive authority) more accountable to the European parliament, but in fact leaves the commission as unaccountable as ever. It holds out all kinds of new social rights, while obscuring exactly who is responsible for enforcing them -- or paying for them. It pretends to be consistent with Europe's NATO obligations, but in fact carefully subordinates the American alliance.

Those excellent reasons for voting non are not, however, the reason that the European constitution is in danger of losing the May 29 vote. A majority of the French are leaning to the non because they are fed up with things in general and Jacques Chirac in particular.

The French economy too is failing, and in despair, French voters are demanding more of the same poison that made them sick in the first place: high taxes, high government spending and high barriers to exclude competition -- very much including competition from the other states of the European Union.

Estonia for example offers a flat 19% tax on personal and corporate income. Slovakia is attracting automotive investment away from Spain and Italy. In 2004, Britain leapfrogged over every other major European economy to become the world's fourth top destination for foreign direct investment after the United States, China and India.

Confronted with these challenges, the French have lost much of their never very great faith in their leaders. Many French ascribe the constitution's loss of popularity in France to an ill-judged nationally televised speech by Jacques Chirac in its favour -- and constitution proponents are terrified that if Chirac decides to make a second speech, he'll kill the thing off for good.

Chirac's looming defeat on the constitution, like Schroeder's looming defeat as chancellor, will be a personal one. But in both cases, the failure is not just personal. Behind the anger at Chirac and Schroeder as leaders is a wider sense in Europe that the European system, once so successful, has ceased to work for Europe's peoples. Both these reckless men have tried and until now succeeded in exploiting this widespread unease for their own selfish ends. They have made a scapegoat of the United States and George W. Bush to avoid coming to terms with the enormous problems of their own countries. Now they are about to pay the price for their cynicism and cowardice.

Couldn't be happening to a more deserving pair.