French President Francois Hollande has pledged to fight what he calls the national malaise as the country continues to grapple with economic woes and his popularity rating plummets.
Å“We must not succumb to self-criticism… For years we have been the most pessimistic country in Europe, in the world even. There are countries at war that are more optimistic than we are,” Hollande said on Sunday.
Commenting on a recent opinion poll that showed his popularity rating had dropped to 26 percent, the French president said, Å“I am not looking to be popular. My duty is higher than that.”
The French market research and opinion poll institute Ifop conducted telephone interviews of 1,865 French people aged 18 or over between June 14 and June 22 for the survey, and the results were published by the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche on June 23.
Hollandeâ„¢s popularity rating has dropped three points since the Ifop poll in May, when 29 percent of respondents had a favorable view of the French president.
In the June poll, 73 percent of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with Hollande and one percent expressed no view.
Hollandeâ„¢s popularity rating is worse than almost all previous French presidents at the same time in their terms.
On July 12, the global ratings agency Fitch cut Franceâ„¢s credit rating from AAA to AA+ over the countryâ„¢s vague economic outlook and the need for structural reform in the world’s fifth largest economy.
Fitch forecast that the French economy would shrink by 0.3 percent in 2013.
The downgrade represents another serious challenge to the French president, who is struggling to revive an economy that has barely grown in more than two years and to tackle unemployment, which soared to a 15-year high of 10.9 percent in May.
Even though Hollandeâ„¢s government has increased taxes and implemented several reforms and spending cuts in an attempt to lower the country’s huge debt load, the measures have proven unproductive since the financial crisis in the eurozone has not been resolved and the 17-member bloc is still bogged down in recession.
MAM/HGL
Republished with permission from: Press TV