PARIS -- President Jacques Chirac, his popularity scraping bottom and his credibility under fire in financial markets, has jettisoned his campaign promises in asking French voters to embrace two years of budget austerity.


His plea that deficit reduction be made the "priority of priorities" -- rather than creating jobs or healing social divisions as he had pledged during his campaign -- was welcomed Friday by Chirac's center-right majority in parliament but won hoots from the opposition.


"I was not elected to be popular," the French head of state said Thursday evening in a live television interview.


To adopt a policy of two years of pain in search of long-term gain "requires courage and time, and I have both," Chirac, who was elected last May for a seven-year term, said.


Opposition leaders quickly accused Chirac of being more worried about financial markets than about the French people.


If Chirac's goal was to achieve unpopularity, Socialist spokesman Francois Hollande wryly suggested, "then he has succeeded in a stunning fashion."


"If he is unpopular, it's because he had a program that was not kept," Hollande told Europe 1 radio. "What is regrettable is that Jacques Chirac has changed his policies without having applied what he initially proposed."


The president's new policy pronouncement put great pressure on Prime Minister Alain Jupp? to deliver on France's commitment to reduce deficits in time for the switch to a single European currency in 1999.


Jupp?, in Bordeaux, called Chirac's message "full of hope."


"He has unambiguously set the course, and I will follow it."


But faced with growing talk of imminent cabinet changes, Chirac had given his prime minister only qualified praise.


Asked if Jupp? would be in his job for a long time, he had responded, "Time will tell."


Chirac declined to rule out a cabinet shuffle. Asked if one was coming, Chirac said simply that this was up to Jupp?.


Chirac's message that vote-winners like tax cuts and wage hikes for the powerful public sector were at least two years off created political risks for the parliamentary majority, which faces voters in 1998 general elections.


But most center-right legislators appeared to toe the line. Former prime minister Edouard Balladur, who was defeated by fellow-Gaullist Chirac in the presidential elections, gloated that Chirac's deficit-cutting plans continued his own policies.


"Begun in 1993, the reduction of these deficits is being pursued at the same pace by the current government," he told Le Monde.


The political risk of the new strategy is less to Chirac himself, who is in the first year of his term and whose approval ratings cannot fall much further.


A poll released on Thursday found just 14 percent of voters satisfied with his performance versus 74 percent dissatisfied.


"I know from experience that affairs of state are a difficult thing. Nevertheless I perhaps underestimated the difficulty," Chirac acknowledged in the live interview.