PARIS — Emmanuel Macron is now France’s least-popular president in the past 50 years, according to a new poll published Thursday.
The Verian Group survey, which polled 1,000 people and was published in the conservative daily Le Figaro, shows Macron’s approval rating at a staggering 11 percent — tying the lowest figure ever recorded by the firm. The previous record-holder was Macron’s direct predecessor and former boss, François Hollande, who hit 11 percent in late 2016, shortly before announcing that he would not seek a second presidential term.
By Verian’s measure, Macron and Hollande now share the crown of France’s least popular president since the early 1970s, when the pollster and its predecessors began conducting this monthly survey for Le Figaro.
Other polling institutes have reached similar conclusions about Macron’s slump following his unpopular decision to raise the retirement age and the months of political deadlock triggered by his decision to dissolve parliament following a far-right triumph in the 2024 European election.
An Ipsos poll released earlier this month put Macron’s approval rating at 19 percent — above that firm’s lowest-ever figure for Hollande, at 13 percent in 2014. And an Odoxa survey published Tuesday found that just 20 percent of respondents consider Macron a “good president” — again placing the 47-year-old only marginally ahead of his predecessor.
“Macron is constantly hooked on polls — he’d need to be blind or deaf not to realize that he’s disliked,” a former presidential adviser, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO.
The president has, the adviser said, “a poor understanding of the consequences that the reforms he believes to be necessary can have on the state of the country.”
The recent ire toward French heads of state appears to be a historical anomaly, at least recently. Studies on approval ratings show the first three elected presidents of France’s Fifth Republic, which was founded in 1958, consistently polling at higher levels.
While Macron’s numbers are particularly bad, Europeans’ pessimism over their leadership appears to be on the up. U.K. Prime Ministers Keir Starmer’s approval rating lies slightly below 20 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls aggregator, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently hit a low of 25 percent, according to a Forsa Institute poll for RTL and ntv released on Tuesday.
PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON APPROVAL RATING
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For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
This story has been updated.
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