Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurent Fabius

Imperfection is doing a lot of political work here. Laurent Fabius frames constitutional change not as a pristine blueprint but as a deliberately unfinished tool, and that’s the point: he’s selling process over purity. By conceding upfront that the revision "will not be perfect", he disarms the predictable critique that any treaty text is messy, compromised, and vulnerable to second-order consequences. The concession reads as candor, but it’s also a bargaining chip: if perfection is impossible, then refusing the deal becomes the truly unreasonable position.

The real hinge is "inflexible". In European debates, constitutional rigidity often doubles as a coded fight about sovereignty and economic policy: who gets to set the rules, and how hard those rules should bite when governments want to spend, regulate, or protect labor. Calling flexibility a virtue signals an appetite for a Europe that can evolve politically rather than remain a market-first machine locked into technocratic constraints.

Then comes the ideological north star: "a step towards the Social Europe which we wish". "Step" is strategic modesty - incrementalism packaged as inevitability. "Social Europe" is the brand name for a set of aspirations (strong welfare states, labor protections, public services) without committing to the painful specifics (tax harmonization, budget rules, enforcement). The subtext is coalition-building: give skeptics a manageable, imperfect reform, and give the left a promise that integration can serve something more than capital. In the era of EU constitutional and treaty fights, that’s an attempt to rescue European integration from its legitimacy crisis by tying it to everyday security, not just grand institutions.