Emmanuel Macron is a French centrist politician who has served as President of the French Republic since 14 May 2017, after defeating Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. He was re-elected in April 2022, again against Le Pen, becoming the first French president to win a second consecutive term since Jacques Chirac in 2002.
Before entering electoral politics, Macron worked as an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie and served as deputy secretary-general of the Élysée under President François Hollande, then as Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs (2014–2016). In 2016 he founded the movement En Marche! (later renamed Renaissance), positioning himself outside the traditional Socialist–Republican divide.
In foreign policy, Macron has pushed for European strategic autonomy, a stronger EU defence posture, and reform of the eurozone. He famously described NATO as experiencing "brain death" in a 2019 Economist interview, a remark he partly walked back after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after which France increased military aid to Kyiv and Macron floated the possibility of Western troops on Ukrainian soil. He co-sponsored the Aachen Treaty with Angela Merkel in January 2019, deepening Franco-German cooperation, and has been a central figure in EU responses to Brexit, COVID-19 recovery (the NextGenerationEU fund), and the Sahel security crisis, including the 2022 withdrawal of Operation Barkhane from Mali.
Domestically, his tenure has been marked by the Gilets jaunes protests (2018–2019), pension reform raising the retirement age to 64 (enacted in 2023 via Article 49.3 of the Constitution), and a snap legislative election in June–July 2024 following the European Parliament vote, which produced a hung National Assembly. His current term is scheduled to end in May 2027; under Article 6 of the French Constitution he cannot run for a third consecutive term.
Example
In March 2024, Emmanuel Macron suggested at a Paris summit that sending Western ground troops to Ukraine "should not be ruled out," prompting pushback from Germany and the United States.