French socialists fall out of love with their guy

By Dale McFeatters

French President Francois Hollande, deliriously welcomed into office last May 6 by the Socialists, who had been out of power for nearly 20 years, is setting a postwar record for a plunge in popularity, from 60 percent to 44 percent.

If the election were held today instead of four years from now as scheduled, polls show he would lose convincingly to the man he defeated, the flamboyant incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, getting just 19 percent of the vote. He would also lose to far right candidate Marine Le unPen, who would finish in second place with 23 percent of the vote.

The national employment rate has climbed above 10 percent, with Hollande abandoning even Sarkozy's modest reforms in France's rigid, union-drive labor laws.

He raised the top marginal income tax rate to 75 percent, prompting many wealthy French to move out of the country, although not very far, usually just over the border. Hollande defends the wildly unpopular tax increase as the right thing to do.

With his government struggling for revenues, he has proposed a $26 billion tax cut to offset higher labor costs. Even though public spending is 57 percent of GDP, his plans to cut government spending have met with stiff resistance that he seems disinclined to fight.

Hollande says he will propose a 10-year, $26 billion plan to invest in infrastructure but has not said where the money is coming from. Some of it seems only repurposed from other programs.

France imagined itself the co-pilot of the European Union with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the pilot's seat, but as Germany's economy strengthens and France's weakens that seems less plausible.

France continues to pay its people at a rate it can't afford, paying significantly higher wages, while running an annual trade deficit of $78 billion while Germany is well into the black.

His critics, some in his own party, says he runs the country as if he were the general secretary of a Scandinavian socialist party, although some of those countries are doing better than France.

None of this has set well with the electorate, which polls find suffering from ``morosite,’’ a general moroseness or glumness. A poll last week, cited by the Financial Times, found that 70 percent of the people believed a "social explosion" was possible in the coming months.

Unless Hollande can get a grip in the economy and soon, cover your ears.

The author is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.