HOLD THE REFERENDUM

Matt Qvortrup writes in todays Svenska Dagbladet that the Swedish politicians lacks guts in not daring to subject the question of the European Union's proposed constitutional treaty to a referendum. He think that they should be confident that they could turn the referendum their way (five out of the seven Parliamentary parties are in favor, including the governing party, but a majority of the population is thought to be against) instead of deciding that it should be a parliament decision only (which would guarantee it passing). I agree, even though it's probably true that the lack of confidence is well placed.

The question of whether or not to hold a referendum should be kept completely separated from the question of whether to adopt the constitution or not. The Swedish constitution says that for the constitution to change such a decision must pass through two parliaments (that is, the parliament must vote in favour twice with an election held in between). Now, it would seem that this means that a single parliament decision shouldn't be enough to adopt the EU constitution, but technically it would. We could adopt the EU constitution without changing anything in the Swedish constitution.

However, principially, adopting the EU constitution should be treated as a constitutional change. This is because it has legal priority over the Swedish constitution. Even if the Swedish Supreme Court would decide that something is unconstitutional (according to the Swedish constitution) the European Court would overturn that decision if they thought the decision was in conflict with the EU constitution.

This, however, is still not an argument for why we should hold a referendum. Following the above argument, we'd get the conclusion that we should have the parliament make one decision now, and then another after the next general election (hold in 2006) before adopting the EU constitution. Ordinarily, I'd happily accept such a work order, but there are some problems specific to this particular issue that still make it more reasonable to hold a referendum.

The problem is that the political parties view in this issue vary greatly from that of the people. For the people to vote for a "No" through a general election they'd have to vote for the parties that oppose the EU constitution and that would force them to fairly extreme parties on the left wing (the Communists or the Greens) - something that's hopefully unthinkable for everyone with a liberal or conservative mind-set. This means that a general election has no chance of giving a representative result in this issue, and considering the importance of the issue, the people should have their say. Not because their always right - clearly they're not - but because in a democratic society the people should decide the rules after which the political institutions work.

A referendum is by far the easiest way to achieve that.

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