Emmanuel Macron will be the next French president after winning the election in a landslide on Sunday, May 7.
With his victory, the 39-year-old Centrist will become the youngest president in France’s history.
Here’s what you need to know about him.
>> Emmanuel Macron was born on December 21, 1977, in Amiens, a city in northern France. He is the eldest child of Jean-Michel Macron and Françoise Macron-Nogues and only family member not to have pursued a career in medicine.
>> Macron spent several years as an investment banker, working for Rothschild from 2008 to 2012. He then served in François Hollande’s cabinet as economy minister.
>> In 2007, Macron married his former high-school French teacher Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior. They met at the private, catholic school La Providence in Amiens. At the time, he was 15 years old.
>> According to schoolmates, Macron was terrible at maths and statistics. Literature was more his style and he used to write poems, and he even wrote a book set in pre-Columbian America which he never published.
>> Under Hollande, Macron served in the Socialist Party, but that isn’t the party he ran under. Instead, he launched his own party, En Marche! (Forward!). He explained that his decision to start his own movement came when he realised he had “touched with his own finger, the limits of the system”.
>> Macron’s dog’s name is Figaro, which is also the name of a right-wing François Fillon supporting French newspaper.
