It looks like Mr Hollande is facing some serious problems. Aside from failed promises over fixing unemployment, and lack of ability to drag France out of its economic slump, he’s now been hit with incendiary claims from his former girlfriend in her new book just released. In one claim she says that he kept her dosed up on tranquillisers to keep her in hospital and out the way.
This has led to his approval rating dropping to 13% in a poll making him the most unpopular president since WWII. The TNS-Sofres poll say his rating fell 5 points from last month to the lowest level ever registered by the poll.
In even more good news for France today, Reuters report that the top ratings agencies are watching Mario Draghi and the ECB closely after Draghi said that it would be
“helpful for the overall stance of policy” if fiscal policy could play a greater role alongside the ECB’s monetary policy, and I believe there is scope for this”
The agencies are worried that messing with fiscal policy and introducing tax cuts could hurt ratings if they failed to improve growth. France was cited as one of the main countries at risk.
I don’t know how important or mainstream this poll is so it’s possibly not something to get caught up in. I also don’t know French politics and what can possibly happen to Hollande if he can’t turn things around (resign, fired etc), maybe some of our French readers can fill us in? What I do know is that he’s in a spot of bother and the next presidential election isn’t until 2017.
Any political change will bring uncertainty and further European negativity to the market, so we would do well to monitor this situation closely.
“Does this come in tin?”
