President Nicolas Sarkozy would have trailed Strauss-Kahn by 5 percentage points in the first round of presidential voting if the election had been held at the end of last month, a CSA poll for 20 Minutes newspaper, BFM Television and RMC radio showed April 28.
Any prospect of getting elected has now vanished, said Laurent Dubois of the Paris Political Studies Institute.
"It's a tsunami," Dubois said in a phone interview. "There is no way he can recover from this and run."
This is the second time since taking over the IMF that Strauss-Kahn has faced allegations of misconduct.
In 2008, he had a relationship with Piroska Nagy, a female economist at the IMF, who quit in August of that year. An investigation by the IMF board, released in October 2008, concluded that, while he had made a "serious error of judgment," he shouldn't be fired.
Strauss-Kahn apologized to his staff and family, which includes his third wife, Sinclair, and four children from his previous marriages.
'Open, Transparent'
Sinclair yesterday said she doesn't "for a second" believe the accusations against her husband, Agence France- Presse reported, citing a statement from her.
Strauss-Kahn took the helm of the IMF in November 2007, following his loss in the primaries of the French Socialist Party ahead of the 2007 presidential elections.
Strauss-Kahn, who succeeded Spain's Rodrigo Rato, has helped reshape the agency's mission and restore its relevance. When he arrived, its emergency lending dropped to $58.7 million in 2006 from $66.4 billion in 2002. Among his first moves there was to cut about 400 jobs.