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With just under 55% the French no camp has won the referendum on the European Union Constitution. This document has thus suffered its first rejection in the 25 nation ratification process.

The Constitution may not be the perfect document it was set out to be, having been called “the treaty of ttreaties” but I doubt that the document was the sole issue that was put to the polls today. A large part of the French population is dissatisfied with their current government. It has after all not won its election in a normal manner. Many have voted for centre-right Chirac to avoid Le Pen becoming president. This has definitely played a role in todays result, with many wishing to give a punishing vote to the government over its way to run French affairs.

What a generally European minded France did not take into account was that this also punished the European Union as a whole. With the Constitution now in dire straights, the European Union will revert to being run according to the Nice Treaty, which is by many seen as a bad treaty.

The French no will also give a negative precedent to the Dutch vote on thursday. Since Mr Blair will most probably bury his plans to hold a referendum in the UK, the constitution appears to be dead on arrival, or better pre-arrival.

Today is a bad day for Europe, and for the European Union in particular.

This post also appears on Europe Blogs.

Hi everybody,

as you may have noticed, the Edinburgh Photos were unavailable for a while (thanks to Hugh for pointing this out). This was due to technical difficulties and general oversight during the transition from Movable Type to WordPress.

This has now been fixed and they are again available via the link in the top right corner.

My apologies for any inconvenience thia has caused.

New RSS feeds are available at the bottom of the page.

Please update you readers, as you will otherwise not receive any new posts.

After having continually struggled to grasp all the functionalities of Movable Type, I have finally decided to install WordPress and play around a bit.

I have successfully imported all old posts and comments and am currently experimenting a little. In case you experience the occasional blip in performance, don’t take it personal, it is just me trying out a new feature.

Expect many changes to take place here in the nearer future, with regard to layout, design and of course functionality.

One thing that is already supposed to work alright is the new registration feature. I have not tried it yet, but apparently you can now register here and after I approve your registration, even post here!

Give it a try. This is new land for all of us!

Wow, let’s get on with it.

UPDATE: The registration feature does not yet work. Maybe later. Sorry.

Since German Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder has announced that he plans an early general election in autumn, all the hype is about the CDU, the German conservative party, who are currently in opposition. CDU boss Angela Merkel (picture) would be the new (and first female) Bundeskanzler in case they win the election. In the polls the CDU is far ahead of Gerhard Schröder’s party, the SPD (german labour party), with 46% voting for the CDU if the elections were today compared with 28% voting for the SPD.

However, in the fight of personalities Gerhard Schröder is far ahead, with 41% prefering him to remain Bundeskanzler as opposed to Angela Merkel’s 30%. With this slight paradox of the people’s preference it can only become very exciting as to who will eventually win the election on the night.

But honestly, would you want her as head of government?