Emmanuel Macron

Emmanuel Macron: The Outsider Who Took the Élysée

At twenty-one, having failed the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure twice, Emmanuel Macron was working as editorial assistant to the philosopher Paul Ricœur, checking notes and bibliography for a book on memory and history published in 2000. Eighteen years later he was President of the French Republic, the youngest in its history, elected without the backing of either of the two parties that had governed France for six decades. Few political ascents in a modern democracy have been faster, and almost none have been made from so far outside the machine.

Two Failures and a Philosopher

He grew up in Amiens, born on 21 December 1977 to two doctors: Françoise Macron, a physician, and Jean-Michel Macron, a professor of neurology. He has a brother, Laurent, and a sister, Estelle. He attended the Lycée la Providence in Amiens, where he met the teacher Brigitte Trogneux, whom he married in 2007, then finished at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris with the highest honours in the science baccalauréat.

The Ricœur apprenticeship was not a decorative line on a CV. Macron read philosophy at Paris Nanterre, taking a DEA with dissertations on Machiavelli and Hegel, an unusual pairing that fuses the study of political ruthlessness with the study of historical process. He has been shaped by both ever since.

Sciences Po, ENA, Rothschild

He arrived at Sciences Po after the two ENS rejections, entering the international section and switching in his third year to the public service track, spreading the work over two years while completing his Nanterre philosophy degree in parallel. He excelled in advanced economics, political issues and public finance. The teaching reports on him survive and are striking: one professor called him a brilliant pupil, very mature, with original and well-constructed thinking; another singled out an obvious aptitude for public speaking in substance as much as in form. Ali Baddou, who taught him, recalled the best student in the lecture hall, and remembered above all that he loved to ask questions. He graduated in the class of 2001 and from the École nationale d'administration in 2004. Sciences Po also gave him the network that later staffed his campaign, including Jean-Marc Borello, Aurélien Lechevallier and the economist Marc Ferraci.

ENA sent him into the Inspection générale des finances, the elite corps that audits the French state. In 2008 he left for Rothschild & Cie Banque, became a partner, and made a fortune advising on large transactions, most famously Nestlé's nine-billion-euro purchase of Pfizer's infant nutrition business. The four years in the bank supplied his critics with their most durable line of attack.

The Fastest Ascent in the Fifth Republic

François Hollande brought him into the Élysée as deputy secretary-general in May 2012, the job that runs the president's economic back office. In August 2014 he replaced Arnaud Montebourg as Minister of the Economy and Industry, and pushed through the Macron Law, which loosened work regulations and simplified swathes of administrative procedure. He resigned on 30 August 2016, having already founded the movement En Marche on 6 April of that year, and declared his candidacy on 16 November.

He took 24 per cent and roughly eight million votes in the first round on 23 April 2017 and beat Marine Le Pen with 66.1 per cent on 7 May. At thirty-nine he was the youngest French head of state since Napoleon and the first person in the history of the Fifth Republic to win the presidency without Socialist or Gaullist support.

Reform, and the Backlash

The first term was built on speed. Five decrees issued on 22 September 2017 rewrote the labour code, capping unfair dismissal awards and widening employer flexibility. The first budget, on 27 September 2017, replaced the wealth tax with a levy focused on real estate, honouring a campaign pledge and handing his opponents the label they used for the rest of his presidency: president of the rich. An anti-terror law that October made permanent a number of measures previously available only under a state of emergency.

The reaction arrived in late 2018 with the gilets jaunes, a movement that began over fuel taxes and broadened into a revolt against his programme and his manner. His approval fell to around 25 per cent that November. The pension overhaul he proposed in December 2019, a single state-managed system, drew strikes, was diluted in January 2020 and was shelved when COVID-19 closed the country in March.

Second Term, Hung Parliament

On 7 May 2022 he beat Le Pen again, with 58.55 per cent, becoming the first incumbent re-elected since Jacques Chirac in 2002. The victory was immediately hollowed out: the June 2022 legislative elections cost him his majority and produced a hung National Assembly. After the European elections of June 2024 he called a snap legislative election that produced another hung parliament and further losses. The instability that followed is written in the list of prime ministers - Jean Castex, Élisabeth Borne, Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier, brought down by a confidence vote within three months, François Bayrou, whose government collapsed in September 2025, and Sébastien Lecornu, who resigned after a month and was reappointed.

Abroad he has been more visible than at home: a public confrontation with Vladimir Putin over Russian state media in May 2017, forty billion euros of trade agreements signed with Xi Jinping in 2019, the recall of the French ambassador to Washington over the AUKUS submarine affair in September 2021, the Quirinal Treaty with Italy in November 2021, and a contested attempt to keep a channel open to Putin as Russia moved on Ukraine.

Why Emmanuel Is Called a Genius

The claim on Macron's behalf is not scientific or artistic but political and analytical, and the evidence for it is concentrated in a narrow band of years. Between 2014 and 2017 he read the collapse of the French party system more accurately than anyone inside it, understood that the Socialist-Gaullist duopoly was structurally finished rather than merely unpopular, and built a vehicle from nothing that carried him to the presidency in thirteen months. That is a rare piece of political perception, and it was executed with the timing his Sciences Po teachers had flagged fifteen years earlier when they recorded his aptitude for public speaking in substance as much as in form. The intellectual formation is genuine too, not a marketing device: a philosophy DEA on Machiavelli and Hegel, an apprenticeship under Ricœur, and an examiner's note about original and well-constructed thinking that predates any political career.

The counter-case is heavy and belongs in the same paragraph. Analytical brilliance in 2016 has not translated into durable governing success. He lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, called a snap election in 2024 that made his position worse, and has cycled through prime ministers at a rate without precedent in the Fifth Republic. Several of his signature reforms provoked movements he did not anticipate, notably the gilets jaunes. Critics from left and right have argued that what looks like brilliance is largely presentation, calling him a media candidate and pointing at the Rothschild years and at spending such as the reported 120,000 euros on press dinners during his time as minister. The honest formulation is that Macron's demonstrated gift is diagnostic and rhetorical rather than executive - he sees the shape of a political moment quickly and describes it persuasively - and that this is a real and uncommon skill, not the same thing as being able to govern with it.

An Unfinished Record

Macron's presidency is still running and any verdict on it is provisional. What is already settled is structural: he destroyed the party alignment that had organised French politics since 1958 and did not replace it with anything stable, leaving a fragmented Assembly and a strengthened Rassemblement National as the most obvious inheritors of the space he cleared. Whether that is counted as the achievement or the failure will depend on what follows him.

Achievements

• Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital (2014–2016)
• Assistant Secretary General of the Presidency of the French Republic (2012–2014)
• President of the French Republic (from 2017)
• French co-prince of Andorra (from 2017)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 2017
• Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit — 2017
• Charlemagne Prize — 2018
• Grand Officer of the Order of the Southern Cross — 2012
• Educated at École nationale d'administration and Sciences Po