Born: December 21, 1977 (age 44) Amiens France
Title / Office: President (2017-), France
Founder: En Marche!-En Marche!
Political Affiliation: En Marche!-En Marche!
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Biography of Emmanuel Macron
Emmanuel Macron, (born December 21, 1977, in Amiens, France), was a 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 support of either the Socialists or the Gaullists, and he was France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon. He was re-elected in 2022, becoming the first French president to win a second term in two decades.
Early life and beginnings in politics
Macron was the eldest of three siblings who were born into a family of doctors with politically liberal views. He attended a private licé (secondary school) in Amiens, where he proved to be an exceptionally gifted student. While there he began a long-term relationship with his theatrical teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, and the two were later married (2007). Macron completed his undergraduate studies at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris before studying international policy and public service at the Grand cole Sciences Po.
During this time he also served as editorial assistant to the philosopher and historian Paul Ricoeur. In 2001 Macron received a master’s degree in public policy from the Science PO, as well as a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Paris Nanterre. In 2004 he graduated near the top of his class from the prestigious cole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), a school that had gained a reputation as a fast track to political power. French Presidents Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac and François Hollande were all alumni of the ENA.
Macron began his public service career in 2004 as finance inspector of the French Ministry of Economy and Finance. Four years later he bought his government contract for €50,000 (about $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 Banke, the French division of the international Rothschild financial group, as an investment banker.
Macron moved quickly into the company, and in 2012 he brokered a $12 billion acquisition of the baby food division of Nestle’s blockbuster Pfizer. Macron reportedly earned €2.9 million (about $3.8 million) for his role in the deal. While in Rothschild, Macron began working with Hollande, as the latter campaigned for the Socialist Party’s nomination for the presidency ahead of the 2012 election.
Macron was appointed to those cabinets as deputy chief of staff and economic adviser after Hollande won the presidential election. Macron became the face of France at international summits and was promoted to finance minister in 2014. He promoted a package of reforms known as the Loi Macron (“Macron Law”) in an attempt to spark the dying French economy, but the legislation sparked a leftist rebellion of the Socialist Party.
In February 2015 Prime Minister Manuel Valls was forced to invoke Article 49 of the French Constitution, a rarely used measure that allows a bill to be passed without Parliament’s consent, On the condition that the government is subjected to a vote of confidence. Walls easily escaped that vote, and Loi Macron was enacted.
As a result, restrictions on doing business on Sundays were loosened and some businesses were deregulated, but the labor market was largely untouched, and France’s 35-hour work week remained intact. Loi Macron was a relatively modest reform package for a country battling persistently high unemployment and slowing growth, but it nonetheless sparked a fierce backlash from both the left and the right.
Rise to the Presidency
Hollande’s approval rating fell as a result of France’s weak economic performance and the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe; Both of these factors would fuel the rise of Marine Le Pen and his nationalist anti-immigrant party, the National Front. Macron began to distance himself from Holland while still in his administration, but the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 delayed his separation from the socialist government. In April 2016, Macron announced the creation of his own political party, En Marche! (“Forward!”), a popular movement he characterized as a “democratic revolution” against a sclerotic political system.
Echoing the third way paradigm that was promoted by the President. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton, Macron proposed a center-left fusion of populism and neoliberalism. Observers noted that the timing of the announcement – a little more than a year before the 2017 presidential election – strongly hinted at an outside bid for the Elysee Palace.
En Marche! Macron’s relations with Holland became more strained after the formation of the US, but this was hardly an obligation given the president’s single-digit public acceptance numbers. On 30 August 2016, Macron submitted his resignation and on 16 November he formally announced his candidacy for the presidency. The campaign took a turn in Macron’s favor later that month when Republicans chose former prime minister François Fillon as their party’s candidate.
In the intraparty competition, Filon topped former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Alain Juppe. Fillon was marked as the front-runner in the presidential race, but his campaign came amid allegations that he had created fake jobs for members of his family and improperly accepted thousands of euros in gifts. had done.
Seeing no real path to a second term, Hollande announced in December 2016 that he would not seek re-election. Valls resigned as prime minister and announced his candidacy, but the Socialists chose Benoit Hamon, a political outsider from the party’s far-left, as their candidate.
Valls and Zuppe, representing moderate factions of their parties, later declared their support for Macron, a significant coup for a candidate who did not have major party support.
France’s historically low support for the 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 ran with the president’s endorsement in 2012. of the French Communist Party.
While Le Pen attracted many from far away and Mélenchon from far away, Macron’s anti-centrist establishment message found support from a broad cross-section of the population. Notably, Macron was the only major pro-EU candidate in that race, driving a strong undercurrent of Euroskepticism.
When French voters voted for the first round of the presidential election on April 23, 2017, Macron won 24 percent of the vote in a field of 11 candidates. Le Pen was second with 21 percent, which guaranteed him a place in the second round to be held two weeks later. Fillon and Mélenchon finished in a virtual dead heat for third, each claiming around 20 percent, while Hamon was fifth with just over 6 percent.
For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, neither of France’s two main parties was represented in the runoff. Just days before that incident, hackers uploaded 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 US presidential election, but the impact of the so-called “MacronLeaks” information dump was negligible, not least because of French media laws banning Campaign coverage in the hours before the election.
In the second round held on May 7, 2017, Macron won two-thirds of the vote, becoming the youngest President of France at the age of 39. However, voters found ways to express their dissatisfaction with both Macron and Le Pen.
Roughly one-quarter of French voters did not participate fully – the highest rate of voter non-participation in nearly half a century – while more than four million voters intentionally cast blank or poorly placed ballots. Macron’s victory was welcomed outside France; In fact, the euro hit a six-month high on the news. With no existing party structure, Macron’s first challenge as president would be securing an executive majority in the French parliament.
When the legislative elections were held in June 2017, En Marche! It achieved a convincing victory, winning 308 of the 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 surprise performance for a party that was only 14 months old, the turnout was only 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 headed into retirement, France’s charismatic young president found room to assert himself.
Macron’s growing influence abroad, however, greatly undermined his domestic acceptance. A tax scheme benefiting France’s wealthiest citizens earned him the nickname President des Riches (“President of the Rich”), and Macron’s criticism sharply intensified in November 2018, when France protested against a proposed fuel hike tax. was shaken by the wave.
The demonstrators, called guillets jouns (“yellow vest”) after the bright traffic safety vests they wore, had widespread support among the French public, and Macron was forced to withdraw fuel taxes.
Macron experienced a brief surge in popularity in April 2019, when a fire severely damaged the Notre Dame cathedral and launched a fundraising campaign that raised hundreds to repair and rebuild the iconic Paris landmark. brought in million dollars.
Macron’s agenda included restrictions on government spending—he said there was no “magic money” to spend on services without a corresponding increase in government revenues—but he was forced to put these measures aside when His administration had faced one of the biggest on a global scale. Public health challenges in a century.
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused a sharp economic contraction as France closed nonessential businesses and restricted travel, but the country recovered relatively quickly.
Although more than 25 million people in France contracted COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease caused by the virus, the country’s high rate of vaccination, and its strong jobs retention plan have made France clear of higher death rates and elsewhere. Saved from unemployment.
Macron’s approval rating continued to hover around 40 percent, despite his administration’s largely effective response to the pandemic, and his low turnout numbers were reflected in the results of the 2021 regional elections. En Marche! failed to capture a single territory, while the revivalist Republicans and Socialists dominated the entire country.
That election saw another record low turnout: just a 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 won nearly 28 percent of the vote and Le Pen won 23 percent.
Mélénchon finished third with 22 percent, and, although he denied Macron’s outright endorsement in the second round, he urged his supporters to “not cast a single vote” to Le Pen. In the runoff on April 24, Macron secured a second term with over 58 percent of the vote.