French President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s popularity has fallen to its lowest point so far in his presidency, a poll showed on Friday, a day after nationwide protests against his reform drive brought tens of thousands of public workers on the streets. Despite falling unemployment and a high profile internationally, the number of people with a favourable opinion of the 40-year-old former investment banker dropped three percentage points in March to 40 percent, the BVA poll showed. That puts his popularity down 12 points since the end of last year, although it is no worse than it was for his predecessors Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy at the same point in their terms, BVA said.<\/p>\n
Frustrated over Macron\u2019s wide-ranging labour and welfare reforms, nurses, teachers and other public sector workers walked off the job on Thursday over concerns about his plans to cut their headcount and introduce merit-based pay. Protesters also want to derail Macron\u2019s plans to raise a special tax used to finance welfare which hits pensioners particularly hard, overhaul unemployment insurance and shake up the highly indebted state railway company.<\/p>\n
Pensioners\u2019 higher tax bill appears to be frustrating an age group with which he has done well so far. His popularity with voters over 65 years old fell below 50 percent for the first time in March, dropping to 47 percent. Macron was elected last May on promises to push through reforms his predecessors stopped short of, refusing to align himself with traditional parties on the left and right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s popularity has fallen to its lowest point so far in his presidency, a poll showed on Friday, a day after nationwide protests against his reform drive brought tens of thousands of public workers on the streets. Despite falling unemployment and a high profile internationally, the number of people with a favourable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25725,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25726,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25724\/revisions\/25726"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}