Christine Lagarde is performing poorly or very poorly as president of the European Central Bank, according to most respondents in a union survey of its staff that suggests internal dissent has surged in recent years.

The rising unhappiness with Lagarde’s leadership reported in the survey, seen by the Financial Times, is a setback for the ECB president just over halfway through her eight-year term in charge of eurozone monetary policy.

Slightly more than half of the 1,159 respondents said Lagarde’s performance was “poor” or “very poor”. That is well above the negative ratings of just under 9 per cent for Mario Draghi, who Lagarde replaced in 2019, and 14.5 per cent for his predecessor, Jean-Claude Trichet. The surveys about the two previous ECB presidents were done at the end of their terms.