81% say France has less influence

THE vast majority of the population think France has lost its importance in foreign policy just as rebellions across the Arab world offered the chance to show its much-touted influence there.

A poll said that 81 per cent of people think France is becoming weaker, an opinion reinforced by recent events in its former colonies of Tunisia and Algeria, foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie’s trips to Tunisia with her parents, and the attacks of French diplomats on the lack of coherent foreign policy.

Only seven per cent of those polled thought France’s position had been strengthened. Pollsters at TNS Sofres said the decline in confidence went hand-in-hand with President Sarkozy’s own fall in popularity.

The poll was conducted just before Mr Sarkozy sacked Ms Alliot-Marie and brought in defence minister and former prime minister Alain Juppé. It was the president’s second reshuffle in a matter of months.

It came after Ms Alliot-Marie, a friend of deposed Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, had offered French military aid just days before he was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.