NEWS ANALYSIS : Honeymoon Hardly Even Began for France’s Chirac : Politics: New president can’t seem to do anything right. In months, he has slid from the country’s most popular politician to its most unpopular.

When Jacques Chirac sat down with talkmeister Larry King on CNN a few days ago, the French president’s performance was very nearly perfect. He was presidential, but not aloof. Articulate, but not didactic. Friendly, but not naively so. He even spoke perfect English.

But back home, Chirac couldn’t get a break.

What, asked the critics, did this French head of state think he was doing, revealing to the Americans that he intends to cut the number of nuclear weapons tests to six, from the seven or eight originally planned? And, others asked, what was the guy doing speaking English, anyway?

Chirac, in the eyes of his country, can’t do anything right these days. Just five months after winning a seven-year term, the president has managed to slide from the nation’s most popular politician to the least popular president in the history of the Fifth Republic. His traditional post-election honeymoon has more resembled a one-night stand.

What the French are calling la grande chute , the big fall, is evident in the opinion polls conducted here with religious zeal.

In May, 59% were satisfied with Chirac and 22% were dissatisfied. A poll published Friday shows that 14% are satisfied and 74% are dissatisfied.

“It is time,” advised Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of the pro-Chirac newspaper Le Figaro, “that the government learn when to speak and when to keep quiet.”

Giesbert gave his counsel in a front-page editorial Thursday, beneath a headline suggesting Chirac had come under a “bad spell.”

What, exactly, has Chirac done to deserve this disdain?

The answers are many, from anger over Chirac’s decision to end, if only temporarily, France’s moratorium on nuclear tests to frustration over police inability to catch the Islamic terrorists suspected of planting bombs.

But Chirac’s deepest troubles revolve around grandiose campaign promises that have gone unfulfilled. Candidate Chirac had promised to uplift the downtrodden, reduce unemployment, rein in taxes, keep wages heading upward and end political elitism.

Those were, of course, impossible tasks.

Today, taxes are going up, disproportionately so for the poor.

Unemployment, which Chirac had called “the priority of priorities,” has fallen, but only slightly.

The government has frozen the wages of 5 million civil servants, about a fourth of the working population. And Chirac has surrounded himself with fellow graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, proving ground of the very “technocratic elite” that Chirac had criticized while a candidate.

Appearing on French television Thursday, Chirac scoffed at his low poll ratings, declaring, “I wasn’t elected to be popular.”

He said the French feeling of malaise was inevitable and added that it would take “one or two years to put our public finances back in order.”

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Chirac has managed some successes in foreign policy, including his leadership role in the Bosnian crisis and his improved relations with the United States. But those achievements have been all but buried in the worldwide outrage over his decision to resume nuclear tests, which has isolated the country and spawned boycotts of French products. Polls show that more than 70% of the French oppose the tests.

The rash of Chirac miscues prompted the current edition of Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine, to list “the seven mistakes of Jacques Chirac.” (A cartoon accompanying the article shows Chirac on a Muslim prayer mat and Prime Minister Alain Juppe saying: “Good news! You have committed only seven mistakes.”)

The magazine takes Chirac to task for political policies that are “incomprehensible and incoherent.” Chirac’s efforts to be less distant and formal than his predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, have failed miserably, the magazine says, making him appear to be a leader who shoots from the hip.

“He has yet to learn the subtle art of governance,” the magazine said.

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French presidents have traditionally been shielded from the most poisonous arrows of public opinion by their revolving-door prime ministers, the hapless officials charged with carrying out unpopular domestic policies. But Juppe has not offered much protection.

Chirac’s choice of Juppe, a former foreign minister and confidant, was welcomed in May. But these days rumors of Juppe’s departure, by firing or resignation, regularly send the stock market plummeting.

Juppe was criticized for hastily forcing out the finance minister, a man greatly admired in business circles but deemed too aggressive in instituting fiscal reforms. And he was embarrassed when his plan to freeze wages drove French unions to stage a one-day strike, the largest of its kind in a decade.

Juppe’s personal reputation has fared even worse. He arrogantly rejected criticism of the luxurious, low-cost apartments he secured for him and his family while he was Chirac’s deputy at Paris City Hall.

When he finally agreed to move out of the apartments, he barely escaped an indictment that would have hastened his departure from the political scene.

The travails of the Chirac-Juppe government were best summed up by a photograph of the president, hands raised in the glow of his May victory, that appeared in a recent issue of the Economist magazine. Above the photo, the headline read, “Waving or drowning?”