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PARIS, France – When even their president is being caught sneaking around behind his partner’s back, it is perhaps unsurprising to find the French topping a poll for infidelity, alongside the equally hot-blooded Italians.
More than one in two men – 55% – from France and Italy admitted to cheating on their partners, along with one in 3 women.
The poll by Ifop, released Wednesday, comes just a few weeks after “le scandale” in France, when President Francois Hollande was snapped leaving the home of actress Julie Gayet, on a scooter.
The photos led to the collapse of his relationship with long-time partner Valerie Trierweiler and a torrent of worldwide comment about French attitudes to fidelity.
The pollsters suggested a link between bed-hopping and religion, saying there was less evidence of cheating in “majority Protestant” countries.
Only 42% of Britons and 46% in Germany admitted to having an affair at some point in their lives.
“After all the noise about ‘L’Affaire Gayet’, and all the articles in the international press about the fickle nature of the French, this seems to confirm the cliches about latin males,” Ifop director Francois Kraus told Agence France-Presse.
Hollande and Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, who was last year convicted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute at one of his infamous “bunga bunga parties”, are “ultimately quite representative of their respective nations,” added Kraus.
Infidelity is most evenly distributed between the sexes in Germany, where 43% of women admit to having had an affair. That compares with 34% in Italy, 32% in France and 29% in Britain.
The more disciplined couples of northern Europe are not complete angels, though.
Some 53% of Germans and 50% of Brits have exchanged an illicit kiss, compared with 46% in France, Italy and Belgium.
But it is the French that remain the most casual about flings, with 35% saying they may cheat in the future, against 31% of Germans and Spaniards, 28% of Italians, and a quarter of Brits.
A total of 4,800 people aged 18 and over were quizzed for the poll across six Western Europe countries. – Rappler.com
Conceptual photo of infidelity from Shutterstock
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