Paris:
France fell into recession in the first three months of this year, official figures showed Wednesday, in further bad news for President Francois Hollande exactly a year after he came to power.
The national statistics agency INSEE said that the economy shrunk by 0.2 percent between January and March, after contracting by the same amount in the last quarter of 2012.
The data comes with Hollande's embattled Socialist government already struggling to tackle a 16-year high in unemployment and record-low approval ratings.
The government's woes have fuelled speculation of an impending cabinet reshuffle, with the talk intensifying after Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday said the finance ministry lacked a proper "boss" to coordinate economic policy.
Hollande admitted the economy was likely to continue stagnating this year, but also insisted it was on the road to recovery.
"It is likely that there will be zero growth in 2013," Hollande told a press conference in Brussels, after talks with European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso.
But he added: "It is my view that we are past the worst."
Earlier in the day, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici had said in Paris that a tiny economic expansion of 0.1 percent was still expected this year.
INSEE blamed the recession on falling household consumption, which suffered its most significant drop in 30 years in 2012, and a fall in exports in the first quarter of this year.
Moscovici said that the recession -- the result of two consecutive quarters of contraction -- was "not a surprise" and was "largely due to the environment in the eurozone".
Figures released by the European Union on Wednesday showed that the eurozone recession was dragging on, with a 0.2 percent contraction between January and March, the sixth consecutive quarterly decline.
Moscovici maintained the government's promise of reversing the rise in unemployment by the end of the year.
"Now we must strengthen our economic systems, mobilise all of our energy to create jobs and to ensure that we have an economy that is more flexible, more competitive, more responsive, more creative and more innovative," Moscovici told journalists.
The recession was not however on the scale of the one in 2009, when French economic activity declined by 3.1 percent, which occurred within the context of a global slump triggered by the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
The French opposition was quick to pounce on the news, with ex-prime minister Francois Fillon of the right-wing UMP blaming the recession on government inaction since Hollande took power.
"Francois Hollande's government stopped all reforms, cancelled them, and did not replace them with any real initiative for competitiveness," Fillon told news website lopinion.fr.
He called for "a real project of deficit reduction that is based on (cutting) spending", tax cuts for businesses and an increase in France's 35-hour work week.
INSEE on Wednesday revised its data for the fall in household consumption in 2012, more than doubling its figure from 0.4 percent to 0.9 percent.
The fall was mainly linked to drops in automobile purchases and in spending on hotels and restaurants.
Household consumption, a key driver of the economy, was down by 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2013, the agency said.
Exports were also down 0.5 percent in the first quarter, another reason cited by INSEE for the slide into recession.
Hollande met Barroso and other European commissioners in Brussels for talks on boosting eurozone growth and France's efforts to reach EU deficit targets.
The Commission has already said it will grant France a two-year delay to 2015 for the country to reach the EU target of bringing its deficit to below three percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Hollande said that the eurozone recession could be explained by "the accumulation of austerity politics" and also blamed a "lack of liquidity" within the banking sector.