One hundred days since the beginning of his presidency, Emmanuel Macron has a lower approval rating amongst the French electorate than the massively unpopular François Hollande had at the same time in 2012.
Jérôme Fourquet, the director of the opinion poll company Ifop, said President Macron, who declared he would govern like a “Jupiterian” ruler, “weigh[ing] his rare pronouncements carefully”, is no longer benefiting from “the magic of his campaign”.
“There is no longer a summer truce and there is no state of grace,” Fourquet said, according to Le Figaro.
Former President Hollande, the country’s least popular president since World War Two, had a satisfaction rate of 46 per cent 100 days into his presidency.
The paper remarks that “the outlook is also worse” when considering only “23 per cent of respondents believe that the country is moving in the right direction. They were 45 per cent in August 2007 [under former President Nicolas Sarkozy].”
“The successes in the presidential and legislative elections, the political recomposition with the appointment of right-wing personalities to the government … the political positioning of the President of the Republic, evaporated,” observed Fourquet.
“Even the announcement of the Olympic Games in Paris does not seem to have a positive effect. The French are waiting for results and a clarification of the reforms.”
“But, on the whole, it is scepticism that prevails,” emphasised Fourquet.
The pollster predicted that the long-term outlook for a French president’s term can be determined by the first summer’s polling figures.
“The perception of a quinquennium [five-year term], as we saw with the bling-bling of Sarkozy or the hiccups of Holland, is formed from the first summer,” he explained.
The French, who favour mainly socialist programmes, also polled 60 per cent dissatisfaction in the decline of housing subsidies and changes to income contributions (53 per cent dissatisfaction).
As a candidate, former banker Macron pledged to ‘liberalise’ France’s labour market – long demanded by Eurozone partner Germany. The reforms were approved by parliament in early August – much to the ire of workers’ unions.
Following his election, thousands of far left, anti-capitalist activists took to the streets in protest, and during the campaign, Macron was booed in his hometown of Amiens by Whirlpool workers, whose jobs were to be outsourced to Poland, as he tried to convince them of the benefits of globalism.