A year after France voted for Nicolas Sarkozy and his promise of renaissance, the beleaguered President will try this week to win back favour in the eyes of a country that seems close to writing him off.

Mr Sarkozy is banking on a 90-minute television appearance on Thursday to give him renewed momentum after weeks of muddle and Cabinet feuding. The troubles have undermined a winter makeover that followed his marriage to the singer and model Carla Bruni.

In a stage-managed, prime-time interview from the ballroom of the Elysée Palace Mr Sarkozy will try to reverse a belief that he has failed to lift France from stagnation and instead embarked by stealth on a painful austerity programme.

Polls for today’s anniversary of the first round of voting last spring show that “le Sarko nouveau”, the subdued, more presidential, relaunch of the frenetic “Super Sarko”, has failed to stem disillusion with his presidency.

Approval of the President has dropped to 36 per cent, making him the most unpopular leader at the end of a first year since the modern Republic was created in 1958, according to a survey by Ifop.

The disappointment was laid bare in another poll published at the weekend which showed that 79 per cent believed that Mr Sarkozy had done nothing to improve their lives. Another poll in the newspaper Libération yesterday reported that 59 per cent deemed his first year to be a failure.

Mr Sarkozy’s troubles have helped to bring the opposition Socialists out of their coma. After the party’s triumph in national council elections last month would-be candidates for the next presidency have piled in against the President. “He won one of the best presidential victories of the modern republic. He had gold in his hands and he has turned it into lead,” Pierre Moscovici, a contender for the party leadership next autumn, said.

Mr Sarkozy, 53, is shrugging off the disapproval as inevitable given the high expectations after his election, France’s impatience with its rulers and the worldwide slump that is amplifying the gloom.

The President says that he has already achieved historic reforms – ending some public sector retirement privileges, loosening the 35-hour working week, cutting waste in the Civil Service, creating new work contracts and so on.

“I am not painting an overrosy picture,” he said. “But in the end I have found that governing is easier than I thought it would be.”

His team is also blaming Gallic conservatism. “The French like reform as long as it does not affect them personally,” Dominique Paillé, spokesman for the President’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), said yesterday.

A positive sign, say aides, is the popularity of François Fillon, the reserved Prime Minister, who has taken a more prominent role since the President’s retreat from the front line in February. “Approval of Fillon means that people are not opposed to Sarkozy’s project; they are just venting their displeasure over current events,” said a presidential aide. Mr Fillon’s success has, however, caused tension with his boss, who is said to be aiming to replace him as soon as he can.

Unhappiness with Mr Sarkozy is rife in his own parliamentary camp, and senior MPs are disturbed by the appearance of confusion. “This is a government that’s all over the place,” Hervé de Charette, a former Foreign Minister from the UMP, said. Over the past month ministers have bickered and performed U-turns as they have announced unpopular cost-cutting reforms to education, unemployment benefit and family travel subsidies. The consensus of the commentariat holds that Mr Sarkozy must now explain his priorities after a period of muddle. With four years remaining in office he has limited time to perform the structural reforms that he promised but has not yet undertaken.

Some pessimists predict a bout of social unrest of the kind that has punctuated French history. Jérôme Sainte-Marie, director of BVA, one of the big polling agencies, yesterday invoked a possible replay, four decades on, of the May 1968 street revolt. “In a year, Nicolas Sarkozy has dilapidated the energy that he built up with his election and he has lost the democratic shield that it gave him,” he said.

SARKOZY'S TRACK RECORD

Promises unfulfilled:

— Raise incomes; increase purchasing power

— Curb public spending, cut budget deficit and national debt

— Rethink tax burden on people and business

— Obligatory minimum service during public sector strikes

— Improve multi-ethnic suburban estates

— End monopolies enjoyed by certain trades and professions

— Ease regulation of labour market

— End favoured treatment for former African colonies

— Create a French-led union of Mediterranean nations

Promises fulfilled:

— New European treaty

— Ended early retirement privileges for railway and power workers

— Started to shrink the Civil Service

— Income tax cuts for higher earners

— Cut inheritance tax

— Partially increased flexibility of labour contracts

— Won trade union consent to reform

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