PARIS -- The polls, for once, were right: Sunday the French rejected the draft European constitutional treaty by nearly 55 percent. This outcome was all the more significant because no less than 70 percent of eligible voters took part.
A major crisis has now opened -- not so much in the European Union as on the French political stage, in the two main French political parties, especially the socialist one. Nobody clearly sees how the challenges will be solved. It's enough in any case to see Sunday's defeat as the most important event that has occurred in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
The word "shock" dominated most front-page headlines of the French press. One commentator mentioned "tsunami"; another spoke of "Chirac's twilight"; Le Monde's editor referred to "stalemate."