Most French people do not want Francois Hollande to seek a second term in the country’s 2017 presidential election, a poll showed yesterday, in the latest blow to the President whose popularity is already at record lows.
The poll showed that 85 per cent of those questioned did not want Hollande to run for President again, with 50 per cent blaming him for not delivering on his promises.
The poll by IFOP for French weekly Le Journal Du Dimanche was conducted between September 5 and September 6. and was based on a survey of 988 people.
The poll caps a week of bad news for Hollande, including the publication of a tell-all book by his former partner Valerie Trierweiler that described the Socialist President as being dismissive of the poor.
Hollande has lost support even among many left-wing voters largely due to frustration over his handling of the economy, where unemployment is close to a record high above 10 per cent and growth nearly flat.
Hollande said at the Nato summit on Friday he would stay in office until the end of his mandate despite the record-low poll ratings.
The IFOP poll followed another on Friday by TNS-Sofres giving Hollande an approval rating at a record low of 13 per cent in August, further securing his status as the most unpopular President in France since World War II. A poll also published on Friday by IFOP for Le Figaro newspaper found that Hollande, who took office in 2012, would lose a second-round head-to-head presidential vote to extreme-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen. Boosted by the poll, Le Pen yesterday reiterated her calls for the dissolution of the French Parliament, where the ruling Socialists have a majority, saying the situation in France was “disastrous”.
“It is more than necessary to let the French people speak again and to dissolve the national assembly,” Le Pen told a meeting of the young members of her party in Frejus. She added: “Polls are giving us hope. They show there is no longer a glass ceiling that would block our electoral victory.” Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic party has been winning voters from mainstream political groups of both left and right amid record unemployment and growing disenchantment with a discredited French political establishment.