Hollande secured his position as the Socialist candidate in France’s first-ever open primary in October 2011, and he went on to top a field of 10 candidates in the first round of the presidential election in April 2012. In that contest Le Pen led the National Front to its best-ever performance in a presidential election, capturing more than 18 percent of the vote for a strong third-place finish. Sarkozy, who finished second, qualified for a runoff against Hollande, and he spent the next two weeks courting the National Front voters who represented his best chance at victory. On May 6, 2012, Hollande defeated Sarkozy, capturing almost 52 percent of the vote and becoming the first Socialist to win a presidential election since Mitterrand bested Chirac in 1988. One month later the sweep was made complete when the Socialist bloc captured 314 seats in the National Assembly, giving it a clear majority in the lower house. Although Marine Le Pen narrowly lost her bid for a seat in the legislature, two other National Front candidates were victorious, and the party returned to parliament for the first time since 1997.

Within hours of his inauguration, Hollande flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel about Franco-German strategy regarding the euro-zone crisis. He endeavoured to shift the emphasis of the response from austerity to growth, but the March 2012 EU fiscal pact reduced the ability of signatory countries to embark on stimulus programs funded by deficit spending. In subsequent meetings, Hollande continued to place growth at the forefront of the economic agenda. On the domestic front, Hollande quickly made good on several promises made during the presidential campaign. He implemented a 75 percent tax rate on incomes above €1 million (about $1.3 million) and accelerated plans for the withdrawal of French troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Although the “millionaires’ tax” was overturned by France’s Constitutional Court in December 2012, the proposal remained popular with the French public, and Hollande vowed to resubmit the tax law in an amended form. With his administration beset with declining approval ratings, Hollande struggled with an unemployment rate that topped 10 percent. His attempts to foster growth with pro-business measures rankled his supporters on the left, and his tax policies sparked resistance from the right. In March 2013 he announced an amended form of his “millionaires’ tax” that would collect the tax in question from companies rather than individuals. On April 23, 2013, the National Assembly voted convincingly to legalize same-sex marriage and conferred the right to adopt on same-sex couples.

Despite Hollande’s efforts, France’s economy continued to struggle. Concerns about a jobless recovery were heightened as the unemployment rate crept stubbornly upward despite the country’s slow movement out of recession. While his economic policy failed to gain traction, Hollande pursued a hawkish foreign policy. French troops intervened in Mali in January and in the Central African Republic in December 2013. Hollande also pushed for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War after chemical weapons were used on a rebel-held area outside Damascus. Faced with wavering support from the United States and Britain, Hollande backed a diplomatic initiative that led to the dismantling of Syria’s chemical arsenal.

The successes of the so-called “Hollande doctrine”—which sought to position France in a more prominent place on the global stage—did not translate into popular support, as evidenced in municipal elections in March 2014. Hollande’s Socialists were crushed, whereas the UMP and the National Front picked up scores of mayoral offices and hundreds of city council seats. Record low voter turnout was seen as symptomatic of apathy among Socialist supporters, while Le Pen’s continued rebranding of the National Front led to that party’s best-ever electoral showing. Hollande responded by reshuffling his cabinet, replacing Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault with interior minister Manuel Valls, a centrist whose sometimes controversial views found support among the French right. The National Front’s ascent continued in May, when it topped the polls in the election for the European Parliament.

The French economy continued to lag, with unemployment topping 11 percent in July 2014, and Valls faced a revolt within his own cabinet. In August 2014 economic minister Arnaud Montebourg, who had long advocated a program of growth over austerity, was sacked after publicly criticizing Hollande’s economic policy. Valls announced the resignation of his cabinet, and Hollande promptly asked him to form a new government. While Hollande’s popularity languished, scandals within the UMP limited the party’s ability to capitalize on the president’s weakness. Sarkozy, in an effort to right the listing party and launch his own political comeback, successfully won the leadership of the UMP at a party congress in November 2014.

On January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. The terrorist action was the bloodiest such incident on French soil in more than 50 years, and it was believed that the magazine had been targeted for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. As French authorities embarked on a nationwide manhunt, world leaders condemned the attacks, and thousands converged on city centres throughout France to demonstrate their solidarity with the victims. On January 9 the suspected gunmen, two brothers who were known to U.S. and French authorities for their connections to militant Islamist groups, fled to a printing plant in a small town northeast of Paris, where they took a hostage and engaged in a standoff with police. Meanwhile, another gunman, who claimed to be working in concert with the others and who was suspected of killing a police officer in Montrouge the previous day, seized hostages at a kosher grocery store in Paris. After several hours, French security forces stormed both locations, killing all three gunmen. The hostage at the printing plant was freed safely. Four hostages were killed at the market, but more than a dozen were rescued.

On November 13, 2015, coordinated teams of gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosive belts attacked targets in and around Paris, killing at least 129 people and injuring hundreds. It was the deadliest terrorist incident in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Three attackers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis; Hollande was among the thousands of people inside the stadium watching an association football (soccer) match between France and Germany. In Paris dozens were killed when Islamist militants opened fire on crowded cafés and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements (municipal districts). At least 89 people were killed when a trio of gunmen attacked the Bataclan music venue, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal were playing before a sold-out crowd. The attackers occupied the Bataclan for more than two hours, holding hostages and shooting survivors of the initial assault, before French police stormed the building. Two of the attackers detonated suicide belts and the third was killed by police. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Hollande declared that France was “at war” with the group. Over subsequent days, French jets bombed targets in ISIL-held areas in Syria and Iraq, more than 100,000 security personnel were mobilized, and police raided scores of locations across France and Belgium in search of suspected accomplices.

On July 14, 2016, at least 84 people were killed and scores were injured in France’s third major terrorist attack in 18 months, when a truck was driven through revelers celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. Tens of thousands had gathered along the city’s beachfront Promenade des Anglais to view a fireworks display, and the crowd had just begun to disperse at the time of the attack. The truck traveled roughly a mile (2 km) down the promenade, plowing through barricades and into a designated pedestrian zone, striking hundreds of people before it was brought to a halt. The driver, who had a history of petty crime but no known association with terrorist groups, was killed in a gun battle with police. Hours before the attack, Hollande had announced the planned lifting of the state of emergency that existed since the November 2015 attacks; he subsequently extended the state of emergency for an additional three months and called up the country’s military reserves.

With Hollande’s approval ratings dipping into the single digits, he announced in December 2016 that he would not seek reelection. Days later, Hollande’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, resigned his post and declared his intention to pursue the Socialist nomination for the presidency. The presidential race had already experienced one surprise, when the Republicans (formerly the UMP) resoundingly closed the door on Nicolas Sarkozy’s political comeback ambitions. Sarkozy finished a distant third in the first round of the Republican presidential primary in November. That race was won by Sarkozy’s former prime minister, François Fillon, a standard-bearer for France’s right-leaning provincial Roman Catholic population. Polls suggested that he likely would face the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election in May 2017.

Fillon’s campaign collapsed amid accusations that he had created fake jobs for members of his family, and in March 2017 both he and his wife were charged with the embezzlement of nearly $1 million in public funds. The presidential race essentially became a three-way contest between outsider candidates: Le Pen, former Communist Party presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Hollande’s finance minister, Emmanuel Macron. Macron had formed his own political party—En Marche!—in April 2016, with a platform that echoed the “third way” policies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. As the left and right wings of the major parties accrued to Mélenchon and Le Pen accordingly, Macron peeled away the centrists, earning endorsements from former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls and former UMP prime minister Alain Juppé.

The Macron presidency

The first round of the presidential election was held in April 2017, and, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, both of France’s mainstream parties were shut out of the second-round runoff. An eleventh-hour online information dump, dubbed “MacronLeaks,” was attributed to the same Russian hackers who had attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it failed to significantly affect the result. Macron and Le Pen advanced to the second round, held on May 7, with Macron winning a convincing victory to become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon. The following month Macron’s En Marche! secured a commanding majority in parliamentary elections. The coalition of En Marche! and François Bayrou’s Democratic Movement (MoDem) held 350 of 577 seats. Women composed a record 39 percent of the National Assembly, but the election was marred by the lowest voter turnout in a French parliamentary election since World War II.

Macron quickly became a presence on the world stage. He established an unlikely friendship with U.S. Pres. Donald Trump but worked to preserve both the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, two measures that the American president opposed. Macron’s growing influence abroad did little to bolster his domestic approval, however. In an effort to attract foreign investment, he enacted a tax regime that benefited France’s wealthiest citizens, earning him the nickname président des riches (“president of the rich”). Public criticism of Macron sharply intensified in November 2018, when demonstrators took to the streets in opposition to a proposed fuel tax increase. The protesters, who came to be called gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) after the bright traffic safety vests they wore, were broadly supported by the French public, and Macron was eventually forced to withdraw the fuel tax. The country briefly rallied around Macron in April 2019, when a fire seriously damaged Paris’s iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral. Macron vowed that the cathedral would be rebuilt, and he launched a fundraising campaign that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from around the world.

Macron’s agenda had included curbs on government spending—he famously quipped that there was no “magic money” to spend on services without a corresponding increase in government revenues—but he was forced to put aside these measures when his administration was faced with the greatest global public health challenge in a century. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused a sharp economic contraction as France locked down nonessential businesses and restricted travel, but the country recovered relatively quickly. Although more than 25 million people in France contracted COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease caused by the virus, the country’s high rate of vaccination and its robust jobs retention scheme spared France from the high death rates and lingering unemployment that were evident elsewhere.

In spite of his administration’s largely effective response to the pandemic, Macron’s approval rating consistently hovered around 40 percent, and his low polling numbers were reflected in the results of the 2021 regional elections. En Marche! failed to capture a single region, while the resurgent Republicans and Socialists dominated across the country. That election saw another record low turnout: just one-third of all eligible voters went to the polls.

Voter apathy remained a concern during the 2022 presidential campaign, and Macron struggled to mobilize his remaining supporters. The first round, held on April 10, 2022, was a virtual repeat of the 2017 contest, as Macron captured almost 28 percent of the vote and Le Pen won 23 percent. Mélenchon finished third, with 22 percent, and, although he stopped short of a full endorsement of Macron in the second round, he urged his supporters to “not give a single vote” to Le Pen. In the runoff, held on April 24, Macron secured a second term with more than 58 percent of the vote.

Macron continued to occupy a prominent place on the European stage, and he tried to act as a mediator between Moscow and Kyiv during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. His reelection did little to bolster his domestic approval, and, in legislative elections in June 2022, his centrist coalition lost its majority in the National Assembly. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne submitted her resignation to Macron, but he rejected it, citing a need for his government to “stay on task and act.” The following month Borne easily survived a vote of confidence, but Macron was unable to bring any opposition parties into his coalition, and he ultimately found himself presiding over a minority government.

In October 2022 Macron was forced to trigger Article 49.3 of the French constitution to pass a budget bill without the approval of the National Assembly. After the comparative instability of governments of the Fourth Republic (1946–58), Article 49.3 was one of the measures included in the constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958– ) to ensure the primacy of the president. The executive mechanism, which effectively allowed the president to bypass the legislature, saw little use outside of divided (“cohabitation”) or minority governments, however, and opposition parties decried its invocation as anti-democratic. Macron used Article 49.3 again in March 2023 when he pushed through a controversial pension reform package that would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. The failure of two motions of no-confidence against Macron’s government meant that the pension reform bill became law.

Macron’s domestic support remained underwater throughout the first years of his second term, and votes of confidence against Borne’s government became routine. The opposition mounted more than a dozen unsuccessful attempts to unseat Borne in the second half of 2023, and she finally resigned in January 2024. Macron appointed Gabriel Attal as prime minister, but the remainder of his cabinet was largely unchanged. At 34 years old, Attal became the youngest prime minister in French history, as well as the first openly gay person to hold that office. As Macron’s education minister, Attal had become one of the most popular political figures in France with an ideological mix of policies that recalled the third way of center-left governments of the late 20th century. If Macron saw Attal as Renaissance’s future and the key to stemming the rise of the far right, the June 2024 European Parliament elections would be the first test of that plan. That contest saw the National Rally triumph in a commanding fashion, capturing nearly a third of the vote. Macron responded by calling for a snap parliamentary election to be held just weeks before the opening of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris.

The move surprised many—even those within Macron’s government—but there was a clear impetus that Macron himself later spelled out. His hope was that “men and women of goodwill who will have been able to say no to the extremes will come together” and support a centrist government, thus restoring his mandate. Macron’s gamble paid off, to at least some extent. In the first round, the National Rally captured a third of the vote and the New Popular Front (NPF), a hastily assembled left-wing coalition, finished a close second. Scores of candidates announced that they were strategically dropping out of the race ahead of the second round, so as to increase the chances of heading off an absolute National Rally parliamentary majority.

That contest saw the NPF emerge with 182 seats, while Macron’s Ensemble coalition secured 168 and the National Rally won 143. Attal submitted his resignation, and months of uncertainty ensued as the various parties struggled to gather a working majority. Ultimately, Macron would replace France’s youngest prime minister with its oldest, when he appointed 73-year-old Michel Barnier in September 2024. Barnier, a moderate whose political career spanned more than four decades, was seen as a possible unifying force, but he had little success in bringing together France’s polarized electorate. His minority government would last just three months, the shortest prime ministership of the Fifth Republic. On December 4, 2024, just days after Barnier had forced through a social security budget bill under Article 49.3, National Rally and NPF legislators joined forces to bring a vote of no confidence against him. Needing 288 votes to topple the government, the right and left opposition coalitions gathered 331. Barnier became the first French leader to lose a vote of confidence since Georges Pompidou in 1962.