After a term plagued by crisis, the centrist Emmanuel Macron on Sunday became the first president to win re-election in France since 2002, but beyond applying his controversial reforms, his main challenge will be to unite the country.
With between 57.6% and 58.2% of the vote, the 44-year-old candidate of La República en Marcha (LREM) again defeated his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, 53, but with a smaller difference than in 2017 (66.1%), according to the first estimates.
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Macron was already aware at the end of the campaign of the task ahead. From Figeac, in the rural center of France, he advocated “reconciliation” between cities, the rural world and neighborhoods. “France is a bloc,” he assured.
Since coming to power in 2017, the centrist has faced harsh protests against his reforms, a global pandemic and the consequences of the war in Ukraine, with the same impetus with which he once again defeated the extreme right. But he was unable to erase the image of himself as “arrogant” and alienated from the popular classes.
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Macron “has promised that he will change his way of reforming and many voters expect it,” CNRS expert Bruno Cautrès told the Libération daily.
“Jupiterian President”
Months before arriving at the Elysee five years ago, he already warned that he would be a “Jupiterine president”, an expression that, according to the Larousse dictionary, evokes the “dominating and authoritarian character” of the Roman god Jupiter. And she did not disappoint. The crisis of the “yellow vests” was its maximum exponent.
This protest, which arose in 2018 due to the rise in fuel prices, spread throughout France to denounce the measures towards the popular classes of this former banker.
The mobilization underpinned his image of “president of the rich” and disconnected from reality, which was earned with controversial phrases such as when he said that at train stations “you come across people who have been successful and people who are nothing”.
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“I think I got [al poder] with a vitality that I hope to continue to have, and with a desire to shake” the system, he justified himself in December during an interview about his mandate, in which he acknowledged “errors.”
“We are in war”
As of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic ended these protests in a new France of confinements and masks and promoted the more “Jupiterine” profile of
Macron: “We are at war” against covid-19, he stressed then.
His personal management of the worst crisis since the Second World War earned him attacks from the opposition and, despite the initial suspicion of the population, he knew how to gain their trust and impose controversial measures such as the health passport.
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The current Russian offensive in Ukraine represents another crisis that brought out the hyper-leadership of the centrist president who, despite failing in his attempt to prevent war, reinforced his international aura among the French. “The vote to
Macron is not based on an improvement in the situation of the French, but on an ability to manage crises, to face crises in a world that the French know is increasingly unstable,” Mathieu Gallard told France Bleu radio. from Ipsos France.
This elegant man with a slender figure and blue eyes was little known until his appointment as Economy Minister in 2014 by the then French President, François Hollande, after being his economic adviser. Three years later,
Macron, born in 1977 in Amiens (north) into a middle-class family, became the youngest elected president of France, at 39, at the end of a meteoric rise of a man in a hurry.
“Brilliant and charismatic”
In 1995, he graduated with honors from the prestigious Parisian Lycée Henry IV, after which he obtained a Master’s degree in Philosophy. During her college years she worked as an editorial assistant to the renowned French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
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In his student days he was already “brilliant and charismatic”, “a good speaker”, “with a Barack Obama profile”, said in 2016 Julien Aubert, his classmate at the National School of Administration (ENA), the former center of elite formation. By then, he had already found the love of his life.
At the age of 16, he fell in love with his drama teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years older and a mother of three children, who ended up divorcing. The mediatic couple that breaks molds married in 2007.
Macron now hopes to complete his ambitious program of reforms, interrupted by the pandemic, and to do so he must first achieve a parliamentary majority in the June legislative elections. But 66% of the French hope that it does not, according to a recent BVA survey.
Among his promises to transform France is the “renaissance” of nuclear power, achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and his unpopular measure of raising the retirement age from 62 to 65, although he has already said he is willing to delay it only 64 years old.
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