Emmanuel Macron: from political unknown to France’s youngest president

The long victory walk from the shadows of the Louvre to the bright lights of the center stage was highly debated in France media and was widely considered as the real end of the climax of one of the bitterest and most unexpected presidential votes in living memory…

Part of Macron’s allure is his atypical rise. He became the 5th Republic’s youngest ever president (39) after defeating far-right candidate Marine Le Pen without neither experience of elected office nor any established political party behind him. Along the way, he manages to outperform the two parties that dominated political life in France for decades, but also the rising populism that was epitomized by Marine Le Pen.

So who is the man behind this improbable but ultimately successful political adventure? At 39 Emmanuel Macron worked as a banker and as a civil servant before becoming an aide to François Hollande in 2012. Just two years later he was appointed France’s Economy Minister but resigned in 2016 after struggling to push labor reforms.

By November he announced that he was making a run for the French Presidency claiming to represent a third way. Those on the right liked him for his economic liberalism and his promise to increase defense spending and those on the left liked his social liberalism and his promise to raise the pay and cut the red tape of teachers working in poor neighborhoods.

But good luck has also played its part from the legal troubles faced by the Right-Wing candidate François Fillon to the move to the left of the socialist party with his candidate Benoit Hamon. Indeed, all along the way the stars seemed simply to have aligned themselves in Macron’s favor.