Support for Emmanuel Macron has fallen to its lowest-ever recorded level of his presidency, with fewer than one in five voters backing the increasingly unpopular leader.
For the first time since ascending to the Élysée Palace in 2017, President Macron’s popularity has fallen below 20 per cent according to an IFOP survey for Le Journal du Dimanche.
The poll found that just 19 per cent of voters expressed support for Macron, lower than previous lows for the neo-liberal politician, such as during the Yellow Vest revolt in 2018, when he still held a 23 per cent favorability rating.
Perhaps even more concerning for the once self-described “Jupiterian” president, the poll found that collectively, he and Prime Minister François Bayrou have the lowest combined support of any pair of president and PM since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
Bayrou, a longtime ally of Macron’s who was installed in the wake of the ouster of former Brexit villain Michel Barnier from the Hôtel de Matignon in December, recorded a dismal 18 per cent support, meaning the collective popularity of the pair stands only at 37 per cent.
While former Socialist President François Hollande had a lower record of popularity than Macron, at 13 per cent, his Prime Minister at the time, Manuel Valls, still had 38 per cent support, meaning the executive as a whole had a combined popularity of 51 per cent.
The poll comes as Paris is bracing for yet another high-stakes political battle over the federal budget, which remains in violation of EU spending rules and threatens to see France hit with economic penalties if the government cannot bring it back in line with Brussels’ fiscal regulations.
Prime Minister Bayrou, whose attempts to outsource big decisions on issues like the retirement age have broadly failed to present a consensus, is seeking to address the nearly 44 billion euro gap in public finances through a range of unpopular tax hikes and spending cuts in addition to the elimination of public holidays, restricting unemployment benefits, sick leave, and paid vacation time.
While Bayrou’s plans do include a “solidarity contribution” on the wealthy, his plans have faced criticism from both the left and right for placing an undue burden on the working class. At the same time, there is growing anger over the failure of the government to address key social concerns.
The budget fight, which will likely come to a head in September, threatens the possibility of seeing the far-left and populist right National Rally of Marine Le Pen banding together once again to remove the prime minister and spark fresh elections.
On Sunday, Arnaud Benedetti, editor-in-chief of the Political Review and associate professor at Paris Sorbonne University, warned that the political climate in France is dangerously verging on that seen before the Revolution in 1789, as governing elites ignore the demands of the public to address issues such as immigration.
“This is an atmosphere of the Ancien Régime without transcendence, but with the unconscious arrogance of oligarchies. On many subjects, the gap between the ruling minority and the vast majority of French people has never been so yawning,” Benedetti wrote for Le JDD.
“If the executive couple is going through an unprecedented zone of unpopularity under the Fifth Republic, it is because he embodies, on the side of the Élysée, an unbearable indifference to the growing resentments of many of our compatriots, when, from Matignon, there emerges a reiterated impotence to govern in the direction of the expectations of the greatest sections of opinion.”
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