From the Fifth Republic’s most unpopular president to the single highest ever monthly spike in a French poll: following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the popularity of France’s president bounces back to levels last seen in the months following his election

The approval rating of President François Hollande has gone up by 21 percentage points following the terrorist attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. This is the single highest month-on-month bounce ever recorded for a sitting president by the polling firm Ifop.

In the latest monthly Paris Match poll 40% of French people approved of the president. The figure is at its highest since the months that followed Hollande’s election victory in 2012.

The numbers are all the more remarkable considering that just a few weeks ago Hollande was the most unpopular president in the history of the Fifth Republic. In fact, eight out of ten of voters were saying the president shouldn’t seek a second term - Georges Pompidou (who died in office) aside, this was unprecedented. Even among Socialist voters, support for Hollande had plummeted, with more than 80% wanting the president to hold leadership primaries ahead of the 2017 presidential vote.

In an example of how low Hollande’s credibility had fallen, another poll by Ifop, this time for newspaper Le Figaro, back in September of last year revealed that the president would fail to make a second round - and would even lose in a runoff against Front National leader Marine Le Pen. An FN candidate had never before topped a presidential poll.

That poll came off the back of May’s European Parliament elections where the FN, for the first time ever in a nationwide vote, emerged as the largest party with 25%.

Drilling into the Ifop figures, the president’s biggest bounce comes primarily from a change of opinion around the personal qualities used to describe the candidate - such as honesty - and in the number of people who believe he well represents the interests of France internationally.

The latter finding was also reflected in two other polls released last week. One set of figures published by Odoxa found that just under 80% of respondents said Hollande had risen to the occasion in the aftermath of the Paris attacks - considerably higher than both Le Pen (33%) and Nicolas Sarkozy (65%). Another poll by Harris International revealed that six out of ten voters trusted the president and the government when it comes to dealing with proposals to counter terrorists - this too was considerably higher than figures registered for both Sarkozy (51%) and Le Pen (33%).

Simply put, in a time of extreme crisis, Hollande felt presidential - and far more than the leaders of the country’s other main parties.

While not quite yet at the levels of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac’s first term, today’s 40% approval puts Hollande closer to the ratings of his predecessors. Of course the spike may be short-lived, and, just as when his previous ratings were in the teens, there is still a long way to go until 2017.

It isn’t uncommon for the popularity of a political leader to spike after a tragedy. When a nation mourns, it needs to come together - and in those moments when doubt, conflict and confusion are at their most acute, voters seek comfort and leadership. The following chart shows George W. Bush’s approval rating after 9/11. The president went on to win a second term in 2004.

Three years are a long time in politics, but vitally Hollande has won back the respect and trust that he had gradually lost and that throughout the past 12 months had plummeted to such lows that many thought he couldn’t possibly recover.

Hollande has now claimed back a platform of credibility - the basic premise upon which to build any form of momentum and dialogue with an electorate.