Emmanuel Macron
Emmanuel Macron has been President of France since May 2017, elected at thirty-nine as the youngest French head of state since Napoleon and the first in the Fifth Republic from neither of the main parties. Born in Amiens in 1977 to two doctors, he studied philosophy at Nanterre, worked as an assistant to Paul Ricœur, and passed through Sciences Po and the ENA. He met Brigitte Auzière, his drama teacher, at school when he was fifteen and she was thirty-nine and married; they married in 2007. He worked as a finance inspector and then at Rothschild, where he brokered Nestlé's nine-billion-euro purchase of Pfizer's infant nutrition business and became wealthy. He joined François Hollande's staff in 2012 and was appointed economy minister in 2014, pushing a deregulation law that had to be forced through by decree. He resigned in 2016, founded En Marche, and won the presidency against Marine Le Pen, collapsing both the Socialists and the Republicans in the process. His programme was supply-side: loosening the labour code, cutting the wealth tax to a property-only levy, corporate tax reduction, and raising the pension age. The wealth-tax change earned him the label president of the rich, and a fuel-tax rise in late 2018 triggered the gilets jaunes protests, the most sustained civil unrest in decades. He raised the pension age from sixty-two to sixty-four in 2023 using article 49.3 to bypass a vote. He was re-elected in 2022, lost his parliamentary majority, and after calling a snap election in 2024 produced a hung assembly and a succession of short-lived governments. He has pushed hard for European strategic autonomy.
- Lived: 1977 CE – ?
- Nationality: French
- Roles: President of France (2017-present)
