The confidence index in French President Emmanuel Macron has collapsed in the last month, reaching 14%, according to a survey by the Elabe institute for the newspaper Les Echos, published on Thursday (9). In the midst of the worst political crisis in decades, the center-right leader breaks his record of unpopularity.
The confidence index in French President Emmanuel Macron collapsed last month, reaching 14%, according to a survey by the Elabe institute for the newspaper The Echoes, published this Thursday (9). In the midst of the worst political crisis in decades, the center-right leader breaks his record of unpopularity.
The poll shows a free fall in Macron’s popularity, from three points in a single month, seven in two months and 13 since March 2025. For the newspaper The Echoesthe result of the poll is “a humiliation for the President of the Republic” and underlines that, with just 14% popularity, the head of state equals the record of the socialist François Hollande, in November 2016, “the lowest level ever recorded” in the country.
“It is no longer a crisis of unpopularity, now it is a crisis of hostility,” says the president of the Elabe institute, Bernard Sananès. The rejection also reaches his voters, he recalls, underlining that only 38% of the French who voted for Macron in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections still have confidence in him.
Political crisis
The president’s crisis is on the covers of the main newspapers and is the subject of this Thursday’s editorials. The day before, outgoing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu had given an interview on French television to explain his decision to leave office, less than a month after being appointed by Macron. A loyal henchman of the French president, the now former head of government was the fifth prime minister of the centrist leader’s second term and the fourth prime minister in just a year.
Lecornu took office on September 10 after his predecessor, François Bayrou, failed to seek a vote of confidence in the French National Assembly. A former Minister of the Armed Forces (the equivalent of Brazil’s Ministry of Defense), his main mission was to dialogue with the different political forces in Parliament to try to approve a budget for 2026, by the end of this year.
Last Sunday (5), after weeks of negotiations, Lecornu presented a government almost identical to that of Bayrou, with centre-right and right-wing ministers. About 12 hours later, on Monday (6), he resigned from his position because, according to him, “the conditions were no longer there” to continue.
On the same day, Macron asked Lecornu to continue directing administrative matters and lead negotiations to try to form “a new base of political support”.
Behind the crisis
The newspaper Liberation believes that the background to the political chaos in France is the pension reform, imposed in 2023 by the then French Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, without a final vote in the National Assembly. The demand to repeal the law was the basis of the campaign of the left-wing coalition New Popular Front, which won early legislative elections in 2024, but since then the president has refused to appoint a left-wing prime minister, as tradition dictates.
“The deputies are panicking over the possibility of a new dissolution,” the paper says Le Figaro in the title of an article. The diary highlights the fear of centrist and right-wing parliamentarians of having to face new elections. The vast majority of representatives of the left and far right believe that the current legislature no longer has the capacity to move forward.
Despite speculation, the headquarters of the French presidency announced on Wednesday evening that a new prime minister will be appointed “within the next 48 hours”, ruling out the possibility of a dissolution of the Assembly. Asked about the probability of a left-wing head of government, Lecornu replied that he had no information on who the next prime minister would be and underlined: “it is the president who decides”.
Source: Terra
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