Mark Steyn on the big French "non"

Here's Mark Steyn on the arrogant EU leadership:

On balance, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president" of "Europe", seems closer to the mark in his now famous dismissal of the will of the people: "If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'." And if it's a Neither of the Above, he will say "we move forward". You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, "President" Juncker covers his ears and says: "Nya, nya, nya, can't hear you!" There are several lessons worth learning from the French vote. The first is that the Junckers are a big part of the problem. Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a pre-ordained correct answer. Yet President Juncker distilled the great flaw at the heart of the EU constitution into one straightforward sentence that cut through all the thickets of Giscard's unreadable verbiage. The American constitution begins with the words "We the people". The starting point for the EU constitution is: "We know better than the people.

And here he is about the European populations' understanding of what's going on:

Incidentally, that 'lunatic fringe' in France now accounts for about 60 per cent of the electorate. That's another lesson for the decayed Euro-elite. One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional 'rights' - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time. Instead, Europe's 'consensus' politics has ruled more and more topics unfit for discussion, leaving voters with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, a left-of-right-of-left-of-centre party and a right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-centre party. None of these plodding technocratic parties seems eager to talk about any of the faintly unrespectable subjects on the minds of voters - Muslim immigration, increasing crime, Turkey, EU labour mobility. So voters, naturally, are turning elsewhere, and in five years' time the entire Continent could end up with the same flight from the centre as we've seen in Ulster.