Fat Lady Singing

From the June 4th Economist, lead editorial:

For those who fancied that they were building a United States of Europe, a combined power with more people and a bigger economy than the United States of America, the double “no” to the European Union's constitution from France on May 29th and the Netherlands on June 1st has been a cruel collision with reality.

Yet neither this analysis, nor a string of negative opinion polls, has made the unequivocal noes from France and the Netherlands seem any less shocking. For the first time, voters in two founders of the European project have decisively rejected a European treaty. . . That such big majorities have rejected the constitution points to a profound grassroots dissatisfaction over how Europe's political elites have steered the EU.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, has responded in time-honoured fashion by picking a new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, as classic a specimen of the elite as it is possible to find. That augurs ill for the conclusions that Europe's leaders will take from the voters' anti-elite message. Too many are still insisting on proceeding with ratification of the constitution elsewhere. Yet the decisive French and Dutch noes have killed the constitution stone dead: there is surely no prospect of these two countries being asked to vote again, as Denmark and Ireland did on previous occasion. To insist that the Danes, Irish, Poles, British and others must still vote is like asking doctors to operate on a corpse in the vain hope of resurrecting it.