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Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron (French: [emanɥɛl makʁɔ̃]; born 21 December 1977) is a French politician who has been President of France since 2017. Macron is ex officio one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra .
- François Hollande
- Élysée Palace
- Renaissance, (2016–present)
- Overview
- Early life and start in politics
- Rise to the presidency
- Macron’s first term
- Macron’s reelection and second term
Emmanuel Macron (born December 21, 1977, Amiens, France) French banker and politician who was elected president of France in 2017. Macron was the first person in the history of the Fifth Republic to win the presidency without the backing of either the Socialists or the Gaullists, and he was France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon I. He was r...
Macron was the eldest of three siblings born to a family of doctors who held politically liberal views. He attended a private lycée (secondary school) in Amiens, where he proved to be an exceptionally gifted student. While there he began a long-term relationship with his drama teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, and the two were later married (2007). Macron completed his baccalauréat at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris before studying international policy and public service at the grande école Sciences Po. During this time he also served as an editorial assistant for philosopher and historian Paul Ricoeur. In 2001 Macron received a master’s degree in public policy from Sciences Po, as well as a master’s degree in philosophy from Paris Nanterre University. In 2004 he graduated near the top of his class from the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), a school that had attained a reputation as a fast track to political power. French Presidents Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac, and François Hollande were all ENA alumni.
Macron began his public service career in 2004 as a finance inspector for the French Ministry of Economy and Finance. Four years later he bought out his government contract for €50,000 (approximately $70,000) to enter the private sector, a move that friends warned would jeopardize any future political ambitions. In September 2008 he joined Rothschild & Cie Banque, the French division of the international Rothschild financial group, as an investment banker. Macron advanced quickly at the company, and in 2012 he brokered Nestlé’s blockbuster $12 billion acquisition of Pfizer’s baby food division. Macron reportedly earned €2.9 million (about $3.8 million) for his role in the deal. While still at Rothschild, Macron began working with Hollande as the latter campaigned for the Socialist Party’s nomination for president ahead of the 2012 election.
Hollande’s approval rating plummeted as a result of France’s anemic economic performance and Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis; both of these factors would fuel the rise of Marine Le Pen and her nationalist anti-immigrant party, the National Front (now National Rally). Macron began to distance himself from Hollande, even while still serving in his administration, but deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 caused him to delay his break with the Socialist government. In April 2016 Macron announced the creation of En Marche! (“Forward!”), a popular movement that he characterized as a “democratic revolution” against a sclerotic political system. Echoing the third-way paradigm that had been promoted by Pres. Bill Clinton in the United States and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain, Macron proposed a centre-left fusion of populism and neoliberalism. Observers noted that the timing of the announcement—slightly more than a year ahead of the 2017 presidential election—strongly hinted at an outsider bid for the Élysée Palace.
Macron’s relationship with Hollande became increasingly strained following the launch of En Marche!, but this was hardly a liability given the president’s single-digit public approval numbers. On August 30, 2016, Macron submitted his resignation, and on November 16 he formally declared his candidacy for president. The campaign took a turn in Macron’s favour later that month, when the Republicans elected former prime minister François Fillon as their party’s nominee. Fillon topped former president Nicolas Sarkozy and former prime minister Alain Juppé in the intraparty contest. Fillon had been marked as the likely front-runner in the presidential race, but his campaign imploded amid accusations that he had created fake jobs for members of his family and had improperly accepted tens of thousands of euros in gifts.
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Hollande, perceiving no realistic path to a second term, announced in December 2016 that he would not seek reelection. Valls resigned as prime minister and declared his candidacy, but the Socialists selected Benoît Hamon, a political outsider from the party’s far left wing, as their nominee. Valls and Juppé, representing their parties’ moderate factions, subsequently declared their support for Macron, a significant coup for a candidate who did not have major party backing. Historically low support for France’s two major parties opened the door for independent candidates, and the race effectively became a three-way contest between Macron, Le Pen, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist who had run for president in 2012 with the support of the French Communist Party. While Le Pen drew from the far right and Mélenchon from the far left, Macron’s centrist antiestablishment message found support from a broad cross section of the populace. Notably, Macron was also the only prominent pro-European Union candidate in a race that carried a strong undercurrent of Euroskepticism.
When French voters went to the polls for the first round of the presidential election on April 23, 2017, Macron topped a field of 11 candidates, capturing 24 percent of the vote. Le Pen was second with 21 percent, guaranteeing her a spot in the second round to be held two weeks later. Fillon and Mélenchon finished in a virtual dead heat for third, each claiming about 20 percent, while Hamon was a distant fifth with just over 6 percent. For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, neither of France’s two main parties were represented in the runoff. Just days before that event, hackers uploaded tens of thousands of internal Macron campaign communications to the Internet in an apparent attempt to influence the election. The attack was attributed to the same Russian-backed group that targeted the Democratic Party during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but the effect of the so-called “MacronLeaks” information dump was negligible, owing at least in part to French media laws banning campaign coverage in the hours prior to an election.
When legislative elections were held in June 2017, En Marche! delivered a convincing victory, winning 308 of 577 seats in the National Assembly. With additional support from François Bayrou’s Democratic Movement (MoDem), Macron’s coalition commanded a total of 350 seats. Although the result marked a stunning performance for a party that was just 14 months old, turnout was just 42.6 percent, the lowest rate of voter participation in a parliamentary election in modern French history.
Macron quickly became a presence on the world stage: as Britain struggled to complete the Brexit process and Germany’s Angela Merkel began inching toward retirement, the charismatic young president of France found room to assert himself. Macron’s growing influence abroad did little to bolster his domestic approval, however. A tax plan that benefited France’s wealthiest citizens earned him the nickname président des riches (“president of the rich”), and criticism of Macron sharply intensified in November 2018, when France was rocked by a wave of demonstrations in opposition to a proposed fuel tax increase. The protesters, dubbed gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) after the bright traffic safety vests they wore, had broad support among the French public, and Macron was forced to withdraw the fuel tax. Macron experienced a brief surge in popularity in April 2019, when a fire seriously damaged Notre-Dame Cathedral and he launched a fundraising campaign that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the repair and rebuilding of the iconic Paris landmark.
In spite of his administration’s largely effective response to the pandemic, Macron’s approval rating consistently hovered around 40 percent, and his low polling numbers were reflected in the results of the 2021 regional elections. En Marche! failed to capture a single region, while the resurgent Republicans and Socialists dominated across the country. That election saw another record low turnout: just one-third of all eligible voters went to the polls. Voter apathy remained a concern during the 2022 presidential campaign, and Macron struggled to mobilize his remaining supporters. The first round, held on April 10, 2022, was a virtual repeat of the 2017 contest, as Macron captured almost 28 percent of the vote and Le Pen won 23 percent. Mélenchon finished third, with 22 percent, and, although he stopped short of a full endorsement of Macron in the second round, he urged his supporters to “not give a single vote” to Le Pen. In the runoff, held on April 24, Macron secured a second term with more than 58 percent of the vote.
Macron continued to occupy a prominent place on the European stage, and he tried to act as a mediator between Moscow and Kyiv during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. His reelection did little to bolster his domestic approval, and, in legislative elections in June 2022, his centrist coalition lost its majority in the National Assembly. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne submitted her resignation to Macron, but he rejected it, citing a need for his government to “stay on task and act.” The following month Borne easily survived a vote of confidence, but Macron was unable to bring any opposition parties into his coalition, and he ultimately found himself presiding over a minority government. In October 2022 Macron was forced to trigger Article 49.3 of the French constitution to pass a budget bill without the approval of the National Assembly. After the comparative instability of governments of the Fourth Republic (1946–58), Article 49.3 was one of the measures included in the constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958– ) to ensure the primacy of the president. The executive mechanism, which effectively allowed the president to bypass the legislature, saw little use outside of divided (“cohabitation”) or minority governments, however, and opposition parties decried its invocation as anti-democratic.
Apr 25, 2022 · The pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has vowed to unite a divided France after winning a second term as French president in a decisive victory against the far-right’s Marine Le Pen, who...
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- Angelique Chrisafis
May 8, 2017 · Learn about the life and career of Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister who became the youngest president of France in 2017. Find out his early years, education, family, rise in government, presidential race, and achievements and challenges as the leader of the world's fifth largest economy.
Apr 25, 2022 · 25 April 2022. By Paul Kirby,in Paris. France election: Macron pledges to unite France. Emmanuel Macron has won five more years as France's president after a convincing victory over rival...
Apr 24, 2022 · CNN —. Emmanuel Macron will serve a second term as the president of France – the first person to do so since 2002. His victory over right-wing rival Marine Le Pen by a relatively comfortable ...
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Apr 24, 2022 · Paris CNN —. Emmanuel Macron has won France’s presidential election, fending off a historic challenge from far-right candidate Marine Le Pen during Sunday’s runoff vote . Macron took 58.5% ...
