French President François Hollande has warned the Prime Minister that France will not agree to concessions being made by the rest of the EU just to help his own domestic “agenda,” reports The Sunday Telegraph.
Mr Hollande’s tough stance, spelled out privately in the “margins” of official meetings in Paris, Brussels, Northern Ireland and elsewhere - is an opening play in a high-stakes game of diplomatic poker.
Nevertheless, it represents a big obstacle for Mr Cameron to overcome as he plots his EU strategy for the next few years.
After coming under pressure from Conservative Eurosceptics, Mr Cameron pledged an “in/out” referendum by the end of 2017, following a major drive to reform the EU which would see the terms of Britain’s membership renegotiated and powers returned to the UK from Brussels.
The Prime Minister is understood to be counting on the help of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, to push reforms through but any opposition from France, one of the EU’s key power players, will make the process considerably harder, if not impossible.
According to high-level French sources, Mr Hollande has also privately warned Mr Cameron he is taking a major “risk” in promising an “in/out” referendum because this could easily backfire and result in Britain voting to leave the union, an outcome which would almost certainly force the Prime Minister’s resignation.
In public, Mr Hollande has suggested the two countries have disagreements on the future of the EU but has stressed the need to find “common ground”.
His private interventions will be of much greater concern to senior figures at No10 and represent the first major signal from an EU head of government that Mr Cameron’s strategy faces extremely serious challenges.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Mr Hollande, a socialist, who was elected president last year, has drawn comparisons of Mr Cameron’s move with the effort by Jacques Chirac to win approval through a referendum in France for the proposed EU constitution in 2005.
Mr Chirac, a Gaullist, thought he would win the vote after initial opinion polls showed the French public was two to one in favour. There was no constitutional necessity to hold a referendum, which could have been ratified in France with a parliamentary vote.
In the end, however, voters both in France and Denmark voted 'no’ in referendums, causing the constitution to be abandoned. Most of its proposed measures came in through the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.
A highly placed French source said: “Referendums are major gambles which can backfire, as they did with Chirac and the constitution. François Hollande has warned David Cameron in private about the risks he is taking here.
“We do not want the UK to leave the EU. We understand the reasons why you are not in the eurozone or part of Schengen [the agreement allowing most EU citizens to cross national borders without passport checks], but the UK actually outside the EU is unthinkable.
Read more of this report from The Sunday Telegraph.