Five years after coming to power as a rookie, Emmanuel Macron, 44, on Sunday rescued a trend that had been out of fashion in France for 20 years — reelection. Before him, only Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), François Mitterrand (1981-1995) and Charles de Gaulle (1959-1969) had been elected to a second term in the French Fifth Republic, as the period after 1958 is called.
The victory now was tighter than the one that took him to power in 2017 and was marked, in the victory speech, by the promise of changes and by nods to other fields, coming from a guy who assumed himself saying “neither left nor right”. The weight of having once again barred the far right, however, has important symbolism.
“It’s a sign of reinforcement for him, because Marine Le Pen’s chance of victory seemed very real in the first round. And he achieves something that the two presidents who preceded him couldn’t”, says Sylvain Kahn, geographer and professor of European affairs. from the history department of Sciences Po, in Paris — the reference is to Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, who limited themselves to a single term.
Few could have imagined that that 2017 candidate would make it this far. Novice, both because of his age and his political-party trajectory. Macron became president at age 39, the youngest in the country’s history — before him, only Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1848, at 40. And he came to power without ever having been elected to office.
After working for the Rothschild bank (which still contributes to the label of “president of the rich”), he became deputy secretary general of the presidency under the socialist Hollande, whose minister he was also economy between 2014 and 2016. He left the government to launch his own party, A República em Marcha, which, in the 2017 legislative elections, won 308 seats and guaranteed him a majority in the National Assembly.
He rose as an independent politician, promising to break with traditional politics and positioning himself as a radical centrist. Now considered center-right for his liberal reformist policy, he is pointed out as one of those responsible for the collapse of the two historic parties, socialist and republican – which, in the first round, received a tiny 6.5% of the votes, in the sum of Anne Hidalgo and Valerie Pécresse.
At the same time, it saw greater mobilization among voters of candidates with radical anti-system discourse. In the first stage of the election, the votes granted to Le Pen, the ultra-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the ultra-right Éric Zemmour totaled 52%.
“Even today Macron remains a mystery: a leader who came from nowhere, belongs to no party system, defies ideological labels and is strangely rootless,” wrote journalist and biographer Sophie Pedder in The Economist magazine.
Married since 2007 to Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his senior and who was his teacher at school, Macron has no children.
Troubled both domestically and abroad, his first term was marked, in the first half, by the Yellow Vests movement, a series of street demonstrations that forced him to withdraw from a tax that would increase fuel prices. And, in the final stretch, for the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine War.
It was in the health crisis that Macron strengthened his role as leader in the European Union, a flag that has always been at the origin of his position. From the moment he arrived at the Élysée Palace, he proclaimed the need for a “sovereign Europe”, autonomous both from a defense and an economic point of view. Alongside Angela Merkel’s Germany, he architected the €750 billion pandemic recovery plan.
While he is recognized for having made France more attractive for new businesses and for the internal recovery from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic — unemployment is the lowest in almost 14 years —, at the same time he finds a country divided and shaken by the cost of living in high in recent months, one of the impacts of the increase in energy prices.
“It was a much stronger presidency in foreign policy and weaker internally, which can be seen from the results of the first round and the lack of support among young people”, evaluates analyst Teresa Coratella, from the European Council on Foreign Relations. In the 18-34 age bracket, Macron had fewer votes than his main opponents, Le Pen and Mélenchon.
According to Coratella, the most difficult period of his presidency is now beginning for the recently reelected president. Domestically, the mission is to improve its relationship with the French and convince them that their European project does not threaten national interests. Internationally, a war within Europe, from which there is still no way out.
