Jacques Chirac is the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic since pollsters began measuring the personal approval ratings of French politicians in 1978, according to a survey published on Tuesday.
As the country continued to writhe in anxiety, self-doubt and anger after its rejection of the EU Constitution, the poll showed Chirac’s popularity had plunged 16 points to 26%.
And 69% of the French population expressed negative feelings about him. ”This is an unprecedented slump in popularity, and it comes primarily from the president’s own camp,” said François Miquet-Marty of the polling group Louis Harris, which carried out the survey. Within Chirac’s UMP party, his approval rating fell 34 points to 50%.
Underlining France’s lack of faith in its political class, 58% of respondents to the poll, for Libération, thought the newly appointed prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, would not understand their problems, and 74% believed he could not resolve them.
With an approval rating of 41%, De Villepin is the most unpopular new French prime minister for more than 20 years. More than 60% of voters felt his government, widely viewed as ”more of the same”, would be incapable of achieving its two main objectives: restoring voter confidence and cutting unemployment.
Analysts warn that the voters’ rejection of the political elite is part of a broader mood of discontent that has been developing for several years.
The message, commentators say, is that France is fed up, aware that things need to change but unwilling to face the consequences, and may even be on the brink of serious social upheaval.
”The referendum spoke volumes,” said an analyst, Dominique de Montvallon. ”Both government and opposition backed the yes, but the no won, fuelled by fear of unemployment, anxiety for the future, mistrust of globalisation, abhorrence of liberalism, and France’s desire to withdraw into its shell. The country is now in such a state of paralysis, worry and anger that one thinks straightaway of May ’68.”
The leading sociologist Gérard Mermet was even more pessimistic. ”France is paralysed by its fear, handicapped by its national shortsightedness, lacking imagination, numb, closed off, depressed. We refuse to adapt,” he said. ”Compared with our neighbours, we are not open to reality. Rather than accepting the facts, we prefer to ignore them, deny them or twist them. A masochistic, even a suicidal tendency is developing.”
Mermet told Le Parisien that France’s electorate had ”zero confidence” in the country’s politicians. ”They need to be courageous, show that their careers as less important than the future of France,” he said. ”Unfortunately, they’re giving the opposite impression. Things will radicalise. There is a real risk of explosion: we are in a pre-revolutionary situation.”
The key reasons for the malaise are threefold, analysts say: a political and administrative elite that, in the words of the sociologist Michel Crozier, ”has completely lost contact with French reality and is incapable of listening or talking, still less of acting”; a common refusal to question a French social model conceived 50 years ago that now encourages a 10%-plus unemployment rate; and what economists call the tyranny of the status quo — a reluctance to sacrifice what you have if there is no certainty of what you may get in exchange. – Guardian Unlimited Â