French president François Hollande is to host an international conference on Iraq in Paris on Monday in a welcome break from a mounting domestic political and economic crisis, reports The Financial Times.
Mr Hollande, who visited Baghdad on Friday, has reinforced his hawkish stance against Islamist militants by saying France would be willing to join in US air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis.
But the president’s robust foreign policy record – he is widely applauded for dispatching French troops last year to battle Islamist insurgents in Africa – will count for little this week as his recently reshuffled socialist government faces a parliamentary vote of confidence and he holds one of his twice-yearly press conferences.
Deepening economic gloom and repeated blows to his personal standing, most recently from a damaging book by his former partner, Valérie Trierweiler, have continued to take a relentless toll on Mr Hollande’s popularity.
One of a long line of devastating opinion polls last week showed 62 per cent of electors wanted Mr Hollande to quit the Elysée Palace before his term ends in 2017.
That coincided with a baleful admission that France was once again set to miss its public finances targets, an announcement accompanied by a cut in the government’s growth forecast for this year to a mere 0.4 per cent.
Annual growth is not now expected to reach the level of 1.5 per cent that is sufficient to start to lower double-digit unemployment at least until 2016.
Read more of this report from The Financial Times.