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Emmanuel Macron

Also Known As Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron

Emmanuel Macron's profile picture

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is a French politician serving as the 25th and current President of France since 2017. Ex officio, he is also one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra. Earlier, Macron served as Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016 and Assistant Secretary-General of the Presidency from 2012 to 2014.

Born in Amiens, he studied philosophy at Paris Nanterre University, later completing a master's degree in public affairs at Sciences Po and graduating from the École nationale d'administration in 2004. Macron worked as a senior civil servant at the Inspectorate General of Finances and later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Co.

Macron was appointed Élysée deputy secretary-general by President François Hollande shortly after his election in May 2012, making him one of Hollande's senior advisers. He was appointed to the Government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls as Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs in August 2014. In this role, Macron championed a number of business-friendly reforms. He resigned in August 2016, launching a campaign for the 2017 presidential election. Although Macron had been a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009, he ran in the election under the banner of En Marche, a centrist and pro-European political movement he founded in April 2016.

Partly thanks to the Fillon affair which sank The Republicans nominee François Fillon, Macron topped the ballot in the first round of voting, before he was elected President of France on 7 May 2017 with 66.1% of the vote in the second round, defeating Marine Le Pen of the National Front. At the age of 39, Macron became the youngest president in French history. In the 2017 legislative election in June, Macron's party, renamed La République En Marche! (LREM), secured a majority in the National Assembly. He appointed Édouard Philippe as prime minister until his resignation in 2020, when he appointed Jean Castex. Macron was elected to a second term in the 2022 presidential election, again defeating Le Pen, thus becoming the first French presidential candidate to win reelection since Jacques Chirac in 2002. However, in the 2022 legislative election, his political coalition lost its absolute majority, resulting in a hung parliament.

During his presidency, Macron has overseen several reforms to labour laws, taxation and pensions; he has pursued a renewable energy transition. Dubbed "president of the rich" by political opponents, increasing protests against his domestic reforms and demanding his resignation marked the first years of his presidency, culminating in 2018–2019 with the yellow vests protests and the pension reform strike. From 2020, he led France's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination rollout. In foreign policy, he called for reforms to the European Union (EU) and signed bilateral treaties with Italy and Germany. Macron conducted $45-billion trade and business agreements with China during the China–United States trade war and oversaw a dispute with Australia and the United States over the AUKUS security pact. He continued Opération Chammal in the war against the Islamic State and joined in the international condemnation of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Early Life

Macron was born on 21 December 1977 in Amiens. He is the son of Françoise Macron a physician, and Jean-Michel Macron, professor of neurology at the University of Picardy. The couple divorced in 2010. He has two siblings, Laurent, born in 1979, and Estelle, born in 1982. Françoise and Jean-Michel's first child was stillborn.

The Macron family legacy is traced back to the village of Authie, Picardy. One of his paternal great-grandfathers, George William Robertson, was English, and was born in Bristol, United Kingdom. His maternal grandparents, Jean and Germaine Noguès (née Arribet), are from the Pyrenean town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Gascony. He commonly visited Bagnères-de-Bigorre to visit his grandmother Germaine, whom he called "Manette". Macron associates his enjoyment of reading and his leftward political leanings to Germaine, who, after coming from a modest upbringing of a stationmaster father and a housekeeping mother, became a teacher then a principal, and died in 2013.

Although raised in a non-religious family, Macron was baptized a Catholic by his own request at age 12; he is agnostic today.

Macron was educated mainly at the Jesuit institute Lycée la Providence in Amiens before his parents sent him to finish his last year of school at the elite Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where he completed the high school curriculum and the undergraduate program with a "Bac S, Mention Très bien". At the same, time he was nominated for the "Concours général" (most selective national level high school competition) in French literature and received his diploma for his piano studies at Amiens Conservatory. His parents sent him off to Paris due to their alarm at the bond he had formed with Brigitte Auzière, a married teacher with three children at Jésuites de la Providence, who later became his wife.

In Paris, Macron twice failed to gain entry to the École normale supérieure. He instead studied philosophy at the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, obtaining a DEA degree (a master level degree), with a thesis on Machiavelli and Hegel.Around 1999 Macron worked as an editorial assistant to Paul Ricoeur, the French Protestant philosopher who was then writing his last major work, La Mémoire, l'Histoire, l'Oubli. Macron worked mainly on the notes and bibliography. Macron became a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Esprit.

Macron did not perform national service because he was pursuing his graduate studies. Born in December 1977, he belonged to the last year when service was mandatory.

Macron obtained a master's degree in public affairs at Sciences Po, majoring in "Public Guidance and Economy" before training for a senior civil service career at the selective École nationale d'administration (ENA), training at the French Embassy in Nigeria[28] and at the prefecture of Oise before graduating in 2004                                 

Education

  • - High school curriculum
  • Master's degree : public affairs at Sciences Po -
  • École nationale d'administration (ENA), training - French Embassy - Nigeria
  • - Paris Nanterre University
  • Lycée la Providence -
  • Lycée Henri -

Career

  • President of France - French politician

Recognition

Reference