Emmanuel Macron's presidency began on 14 May 2017, when he took office after winning the 2017 French presidential election. At age 39, he was the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. Macron was the founding member of Renaissance and was reelected in the 2022 French presidential election.
Background En Marche !
Macron became known to the French public via his appearance on the French TV programme in March 2015. Before forming En Marche !, Macron had hosted a series of events with him speaking in public, his first one in March 2015 in Val-de-Marne. Macron threatened to leave Manuel Valls' second government over a proposed reform on removing dual-nationality from terrorists. He took diplomatic trips, including one to Israel where he spoke on the advancement of digital technology.
Tensions around Macron's loyalty to the Valls government and François Hollande increased when they turned down "Macron 2", a bill he proposed that had a larger scope than the original . Macron was given the chance to insert his opinion into the El Khomri law and put specific parts of Macron 2 into the law although Myriam El Khomri was able to overturn these with the help of other ministers.
Amid tensions and deterioration of relations with the government, Macron founded an independent political party, En Marche !, in Amiens on 6 April 2016. It became a liberal, progressive political movement. The party and Macron were both reprimanded by President Hollande and the question of Macron's loyalty to the government was raised. Several MEPs spoke out in support of the party, although the majority of the Socialist Party spoke against En Marche ! including Valls, Michel Sapin, Axelle Lemaire and Christian Eckert.
In June 2016, support for Macron and his movement, En Marche !, began to grow in the media with Libération reporting that L'Express, Les Échos, , and L'Opinion had begun to voice public support for Macron. Following controversies surrounding trade unionists and their protests, major newspapers began to run stories about Macron and En Marche ! on their front page with mainly positive comments. Criticized by both the far-left and the far-right, these pro-Macron influencers in the press were dubbed "Macronites".
In May 2016, Orleans mayor Olivier Carré invited Macron to the festival commemorating the 587th anniversary of Joan of Arc's efforts during the Siege of Orléans. LCI reported that Macron was trying to recover the symbol of Joan of Arc from the far-right. Macron later went to Puy du Fou and declared he was "not a socialist" in a speech amid rumours he was going to leave the government.
Resignation On 30 August 2016, Macron resigned from government ahead of the 2017 presidential election, to devote himself to En Marche !. Tensions had been rising amid several reports that he wanted to leave the government since early 2015. Macron initially planned to leave after the cancellation of his "Macron 2" law, but after a meeting with Hollande, he decided to stay and an announcement was planned to declare that Macron was committed to the government, later delayed due to the attacks in Nice and Normandy. Sapin replaced Macron. Speaking on Macron's resignation, Hollande said he had been "betrayed". According to an IFOP poll, 84% of people agreed with Macron's decision to resign.
2017 presidential campaign
First round Macron first showed an intention to run by forming En Marche ! and his resignation allowed him to dedicate himself to his movement. He announced that he was considering running for president in April 2016, and after his resignation, media sources reported patterns in Macron's fundraising matching typical presidential campaign tactics. In October 2016, Macron criticized Hollande's goal of serving as a "normal" president, saying that France needed a more "Jupiterian presidency".
On 16 November 2016, Macron formally declared his candidacy. In his announcement speech, Macron called for a "democratic revolution" and promised to "unblock France". He had expressed hope that Hollande would run several months earlier, saying that, as the sitting president, he was the legitimate candidate for the Socialist Party. Macron's book Révolution was published on 24 November 2016 and reached fifth position on the French best-seller list in December 2016.
Shortly after announcing his run, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis and Valls both asked Macron to run in the Socialist Party presidential primary, which Macron ultimately chose not to do. Cambadélis began to threaten to exclude Socialist party members who associated with or supported Macron following Lyon mayor Gérard Collomb's declaration of support for Macron.
Macron's campaign, headed by French economist Sophie Ferracci, announced in December 2016 that it had raised 3.7 million euros in donations without public funding (as En Marche ! was not a registered political party). This was three times the budget of then-front-runner Alain Juppé. Benoît Hamon requested that Macron reveal a list of his donors amidst accusations of conflicts of interest due to his work for Rothschild & Co, which Macron dismissed as "demagogy", invoking donor's right to privacy. Atlantico later reported that Macron had spent €120,000 setting up dinners and meetings with various personalities within the media and in French popular culture while at Bercy. Macron was then accused by deputies Christian Jacob and Philippe Vigier of using this money to aid En Marche !. Sapin, his successor to the post, saw nothing illegal about Macron's actions, saying that he had the right to spend the funds. Macron said the allegations were "defamatory" and that none of the ministerial budget had been spent on his party.
Macron's campaign enjoyed considerable media coverage. Mediapart reported that Macron had over fifty magazine covers dedicated purely to him compared to Melenchon's "handful", despite similar online followings and both displaying momentum during the campaign. Macron was consistently labelled by the far-left and far-right as the "media candidate" and was viewed as such in opinion polls. He was friends with the owners of Le MondeMichaela Wiegel: Seine Lehrerin, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 May 2017, p. 9. and Claude Perdiel (former owner of Nouvel Observateur). Many observers compared Macron's campaign to marketing a product. Maurice Lévy, a former CEO, used "marketing tactics" to try to advance Macron's presidential ambitions. The magazine Marianne has reported that BFMTV, owned by Patrick Drahi, broadcast more coverage of Macron than of the other four main candidates combined, Marianne said this may be due to Macron's campaign's links with Drahi through Drahi's former colleague, Bernard Mourad.
After a range of comparisons to centrist François Bayrou, Bayrou announced he was not going to stand in the presidential election and instead form an electoral alliance with Macron launched on 22 February 2017, and lasted as En Marche ! and the Democratic Movement became allies in the National Assembly. Following this, Macron's poll ratings began to rise and after several legal issues surrounding François Fillon become publicized, Macron overtook him to become the front runner after polls showed him beating National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round.
Macron attracted criticism for the time taken to spell out a formal program during his campaign; despite declaring in November that he had not released a complete set of proposals by February, attracting attacks from critics and concern among supporters. He eventually laid out his 150-page formal program on 2 March, publishing it online and discussing it at a marathon press conference that day.
Macron secured endorsements from Bayrou of the Democratic Movement (MoDem), MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ecology candidate François de Rugy of the primary of the left, and Socialist MP Richard Ferrand, secretary-general of En Marche !, as well as numerous others – many from the Socialist Party, but also centrist and centre-right politicians. The Grand Mosque of Paris urged French Muslims to vote en masse for Macron.
On 23 April 2017, Macron received the most votes in the first round of the presidential election, with 24% of the overall vote or more than 8 million votes. He progressed to the second round with Marine Le Pen. Fillon and Hamon endorsed Macron.
Second round Hollande also endorsed Macron. Many foreign politicians voiced support for Macron in his bid, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former US President Barack Obama.
A debate was arranged between Macron and Le Pen on 3 May 2017. The debate lasted for 2 hours and opinion polls scored the match for Macron.
In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, said that Russia is behind "high level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false information shared about our candidate...".
Two days before the 7 May election, it was reported that nine gigabytes of Macron's campaign emails had been anonymously posted to Pastebin, a document-sharing site. These documents were then spread onto 4chan, which led to the hashtag "#macronleaks" trending on Twitter. In a statement, En Marche ! said, "The En Marche ! movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information". Macron's campaign had been presented a report in March 2017 by Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En Marche ! had been the target of phishing attacks. Trend Micro accused Russian hacking group Fancy Bear of the attack. Fancy Bear was also accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee on 22 July 2016. These same emails were released in July 2017 by WikiLeaks; some were verified. This was after Le Pen accused Macron of tax avoidance.
On 7 May 2017, Macron was elected President of France with 66.1% of the vote compared to Marine Le Pen's 33.9%. The election had record abstention at 25.4% and 8% of ballots were blank or spoilt. Macron resigned from his role as president of En Marche ! and Catherine Barbaroux became interim leader.
First term
At 39, Macron was the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. He was the first president born after the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
Macron formally became president on 14 May.
His first official foreign visit was to meet in Berlin with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. The two leaders emphasised the importance of France–Germany relations to the European Union. They agreed to draw up a "common road map" for Europe, insisting that neither was against changes to the Treaties of the European Union.
In the 2017 legislative election, Macron's party La République En Marche ! and its Democratic Movement allies secured a comfortable majority, winning 350 seats out of 577. After The Republicans emerged as the winners of the Senate elections, government spokesman Christophe Castaner stated the elections were a "failure" for his party.
Appointments
Patrick Strzoda: chief of staff Ismaël Emelien: special advisor for strategy, communication and speeches. Édouard Philippe (Republican): Prime Minister (May). Jean Castex (Republican): Prime Minister (July). Castex was seen as a social conservative. The appointment was described as a "doubling down on a course that is widely seen as centre-right in economic terms".
Domestic affairs In his first few months as president, Macron pressed for the enactment of reforms on ethics, labour laws, taxes, and law enforcement.
In 2017, Paris was selected for the 2024 Summer Olympics, after a bidding process that had started in 2015.