French president Francois Hollande will not stand for re-election

President François Hollande stunned France on Thursday when he announced that he would not run for a second term in next year’s presidential election.

Thursday’s announcement had a similar ring in political culture to the famously abrupt dropout of former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

Some polls have seen his approval rating plummet to as low as 4%, making him the most unpopular President in French modern history, against a backdrop of a series of terror attacks.

Mr. Hollande came to power in 2012 on a promise to do away with austerity in the eurozone and push growth-friendly stimulus to bring down unemployment.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls is widely expected to jump into the Socialist primary field.

Montebourg, who was an economy minister for a spell in Hollande’s government, is waging a stridently left-wing campaign – highlighting the need to protect French industry from cut-throat global competition.

“The world, Europe and France went through particularly severe tests during my term in office”, Hollande said.

But now the right – in the form of Mr Hollande’s own Prime Minister Manuel Valls – has come to the same state of despair.

Valls said last week he was “ready” to compete in next month’s Socialist primary. “Like the last 1920’s and 30’s, something is changing, and it means we are going to have new leaders”.

Francois Hollande has always been an unlikely French president, a guy proud to call himself “normal” and who ended up in the Elysee Palace nearly by default.

Hollande had a 28-year relationship with fellow politician Segolene Royal; they have four children together, but never married, and split in 2007.

The President’s office denied rumours of an internal battle and said the two men had their weekly working lunch on Monday at the Elysee Palace in a “cordial and studious atmosphere”. “There’s something that is broken in our democracy”.

Across the political spectrum, many saluted Hollande’s announcement as “courageous” and “dignified”.

Some 80 percent of the French public said they approved of Hollande’s choice, according to a poll by Harris Interactive published Friday.

Hollande has announces he will not be running in the 2017 French Presidential election. “But also for a reason that comes from France; the Gaullist presidency has ended”.

Hollande, 62, defeated Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 to become the first Socialist president to win a French election since François Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988. Fillon is a former prime minister. He is the first president to throw in the towel in at least five decades.

Hollande’s departure, however, may not boost the chances of his deeply divided leftist party. “And for others in the left, economic competitiveness is the only solution”.

But with the full range of candidates still unknown and the role of independents such as 38-year-old ex-minister Emmanuel Macron hard to predict, analysts urge caution about the forecasts.

And far-right nationalism has gained traction in France, as it has in other parts of Europe, like the United Kingdom and Germany.

All recent polls have predicted neither Mr Hollande nor any other Socialist candidate would make it past round one.