French President Francois Hollande’s approval rating fell below 20 percent for the first time since his May 2012 election, a poll today showed, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
The record-low unpopularity reflects the turmoil in his personal life and unemployment that has reached a 16-year high, the TNS Sofres opinion poll for Le Figaro Magazine showed. Hollande’s approval rating this month was at 19 percent, down 3 percentage points from January, according to the poll.
Twenty-one months into his mandate, Hollande’s popularity rating is lower than that of his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. At this point in their mandates, Sarkozy’s rating stood at 37 percent, Chirac’s at 35 percent.
The record- low rating for any president in a TNS Sofres poll was for Chirac at 16 percent in July 2006, when he had been in office for 11 years and was nearing the end of his second term.
Read more of this Bloomberg report published by the San Francisco Chronicle.