February 2005

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SPAIN SAYS ‘YES’ IN FIRST REFERENDUM ON EU CONSTITUTION AND SLOVENIA RATIFIES IT

February 2005 – The referendum held on 20 February in Spain on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe came out with a wide majority voting ‘yes’, although the turnout, at about 42%, was the lowest ever in a referendum held in Spain since it recovered democracy. The support to the Treaty accounted for 77% of the votes, while the ‘no’ votes reached 17%. Blank votes accounted for 6%. However, while these are the overall results, the outcomes showed significant variations on a territorial basis, as the vote had a different pattern especially in those areas having their own national identity and a different language. While in most autonomous communities the ‘yes’ votes ranged from 81 to 86% and the ‘no’ votes from 10 to 13%, in the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia the support was much lower and the opposition higher. The most outstanding case was the Basque Country, where the ‘yes’ got 63% and the ‘no’ 34%. The results in Navarre were 65% for the ‘yes’ and 29% for the ‘no’, and in Catalonia: ‘yes’: 65% and ‘no’: 28%. In the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands, the other two Catalan-speaking autonomous communities, the opposition to the Treaty was relatively higher than in most monolingual autonomous communities, as the ‘no’ votes reached 16%. In Asturies, where Asturian is also spoken although it is not official, the results were very similar: ‘yes’: 76%; ‘no’: 18%. And yet, as for Galicia, despite having its own language, it was an exception to that differentiated voting pattern, as the ‘yes’ got 81% and the ‘no’ 12%. Other regions with a clearly differentiated voting behaviour were Cantabria (79/15) and Madrid (74/19), although in such cases the national and linguistic factors are unexistent.

Such territorial differentiation, especially in the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia, was basically due to national identity and linguistic reasons. While most political parties, including some nationalist ones, were in favour of the constitutional treaty, civil society mobilisations played a key role in providing arguments for the ‘no’. As regards the national identity arguments, they claimed that the treaty does not sufficiently recognise the rights of stateless nations and national minorities, especially since all references to ‘peoples’ have been erased from the text. As concerns linguistic issues, the main reason was the fact that Spain’s request for official status for Basque, Catalan and Galician does not aim at full equality with the rest of the Union’s official and working languages. Moreover, such request must still be unanimously approved by the 25 Member States. In this sense, Spanish Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero assured just a few days before the referendum that he had been given the support from French President Jacques Chirac. However, for the moment France’s support remains just a promise.

Spain is the first EU Member State to hold a referendum on the constitutional treaty, although it had no binding force. There still remain nine more states to ratify the text after holding a poll. As for the 15 states which have decided to ratify it through the ‘parliamentary’ procedure, three have already done so: Lithuania, Hungary (November and December 2004, respectively) and Slovenia (1 February 2005). Slovenia’s Parliament approved it by 79 votes to four. The Treaty is expected to enter into force by November 2006 provided that all Member States ratify it.