After a range of comparisons to centrist, François Bayrou, Bayrou announced he was not going to stand in the presidential election and instead form an electoral alliance with Macron which went into effect on 22 February 2017, and has since lasted with En marche and the Democratic Movement becoming allies in the National Assembly. Following this, Macron's poll ratings began to rise and after several legal issues surrounding François Fillon become publicized, Macron overtook him in the polls to become the front runner after polls shown him beating National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round.
On 23 April 2017, Macron received the most votes in the first round of the presidential election, with 24% of the overall vote and more than 8 million votes all together. He progressed to the second round with Marine Le Pen. Former candidates François Fillon and Benoît Hamon voiced their support for Macron.
Macron qualified for the run-off against National Front candidate Marine Le Pen on 23 April 2017, after coming first place in the vote count. Following the announcement of his qualification, François Fillon and Benoît Hamon expressed support for Macron. President François Hollande also endorsed Macron. Many foreign politicians voiced support for Macron in his bid against right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former US President Barack Obama.
A debate was arranged between Macron and Le Pen on 3 May 2017. The debate lasted for 2 hours and Macron was considered the winner due to opinion polls.
In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, told Britain's Sky News that Russia is behind "high level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false information shared about our candidate ...".
Two days before the French Presidential Election on 7 May, it was reported that nine gigabytes of Macron's campaign emails had been anonymously posted to Pastebin, a document-sharing site. These documents were then spread onto the imageboard 4chan which led to the hashtag "#macronleaks" trending on Twitter. In a statement on the same evening, Macron's political movement, En marche, said: "The En marche movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information". Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by the Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En marche had been the target of phishing attacks. Trend Micro said that the group conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy Bear who were also accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee on 22 July 2016. These same emails were verified and released in July 2017 by WikiLeaks. This was following Le Pen accusing Macron of tax avoidance.
On 7 May 2017, Macron was elected President of France with 66.1% of the vote compared to Marine Le Pen's 33.9%. The election had record abstention at 25.4% and 8% of ballots being blank or spoilt. Macron resigned from his role as president of En marche and Catherine Barbaroux became interim leader.
Macron qualified for the runoff after the first round of the election on 23 April 2017. He won the second round of the presidential election on 7 May by a landslide according to preliminary results, making the candidate of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, concede. At 39, he became the youngest president in French history and the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. He is also the first president of France born after the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
In the 2017 legislative election, Macron's party La République en marche and its Democratic Movement allies secured a comfortable majority, winning 350 seats out of 577. After The Republicans emerged as the winners of the Senate elections, government spokesman Christophe Castaner stated the elections were a "failure" for his party.
The National Assembly including the Senate approved the proposal, allowing the government to loosen the labour laws after negotiations with unions and employers' groups. The reforms, which were discussed with unions, limit payouts for dismissals deemed unfair and give companies greater freedom to hire and fire employees as well as to define acceptable working conditions. The president signed five decrees reforming the labour rules on 22 September. Government figures released in October 2017 revealed that during the legislative push to reform the labour code, the unemployment rate had dropped 1.8%, the biggest since 2001.
Pierre de Villiers, then-Chief of the General Staff of the Armies, stepped down on 19 July 2017 following a confrontation with Macron. De Villiers cited the military budget cut of €850 million as the main reason he was stepping down. Le Monde later reported that De Villiers told a parliamentary group, "I will not let myself be fucked like this." Macron named François Lecointre as De Villiers' replacement.
In February 2017, Macron announced a plan to offer voluntary redundancy in an attempt to further cut jobs from the French civil service. In December 2019, Macron informed that he would scrap 20th century Byzantine pension system and introduce a single nations pension system managed by the state. In January 2020, after weeks of public transport shutdown and vandalization across Paris against the new pension plan, Macron compromised the plan by revizing the retirement age. In February, the pension overhaul was adopted by decree using Article 49 of the French constitution.
In July 2017, the Senate approved its first reading of a controversial bill with stricter anti-terror laws, a campaign pledge of Macron. The National Assembly voted on 3 October to pass the bill 415–127, with 19 abstentions. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb described France as being "still in a state of war" ahead of the vote, with the 1 October Marseille stabbing having taken place two days prior. The Senate then passed the bill on its second reading by a 244–22 margin on 18 October. Later that day Macron stated that 13 terror plots had been foiled since 2017 began. The law replaced the state of emergency in France and made some of its provisions permanent.
The law gives authorities expanded power to search homes, restrict movement, close places of worship, and search areas around train stations as well as international ports and airports. It was passed after modifications to address concerns about civil liberties. The most punitive measures will be reviewed annually and are scheduled to lapse by the end of 2020. The bill was signed into law by Macron on 30 October 2017. He announced that, starting 1 November, it would bring an end to the state of emergency.
Macron attended the 2017 Brussels summit on 25 May 2017, his first NATO summit as president of France. At the summit, he met US President Donald Trump for the first time. The meeting was widely publicized due to a handshake between the two of them being characterized as a "power-struggle".
On 29 May 2017, Macron met with Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles. The meeting sparked controversy when Macron denounced Russia Today and Sputnik accusing the news agencies of being "organs of influence and propaganda, of lying propaganda". Macron also urged cooperation in the conflict against ISIS and warned that France would respond with force in Syria if chemical weapons are used. In response to the chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018, Macron directed French participation in airstrikes against Syrian government sites, coordinated with the United States and the United Kingdom.
An IFOP poll on 24 June 2017 said that 64 per cent of French people were pleased with Macron's performance. In the IFOP poll on 23 July 2017, Macron suffered a 10 per cent point drop in popularity, the largest for any president since Jacques Chirac in 1995. 54 per cent of French people approved of Macron's performance a 24 percentage point drop in three months. The main contributors to this drop in popularity are his recent confrontations with former Chief of Defence Staff Pierre de Villiers, the nationalization of the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard owned by the bankrupt STX Offshore & Shipbuilding, and the reduction in housing benefit. In August 2017, IFOP polls stated that 40 per cent approved and 57 per cent disapproved of his performance.
In April 2017, Macron called for a "rebalancing" of Germany's trade surplus, saying that "Germany benefits from the imbalances within the Eurozone and achieves very high trade surpluses".
In January 2017, he said France needed a more "balanced" policy toward Syria, including talks with Bashar al-Assad. In April 2017, following the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Macron proposed a possible military intervention against the Assad regime, preferably under United Nations auspices. He has warned if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons during his presidency he will act unilaterally to punish it.
Macron has called for a peaceful solution during the 2017 North Korea crisis, though he agreed to work with US President Trump against North Korea. Macron and Trump apparently conducted a phone call on 12 August 2017 where they discussed confronting North Korea, denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and enforcing new sanctions.
On 1 May 2017, Macron said the EU needs to reform or face Frexit. On 26 September, he unveiled his proposals for the EU, intending to deepen the bloc politically and harmonize its rules. He argued for institutional changes, initiatives to promote EU, along with new ventures in the technology, defence and energy sectors. His proposals also included setting up a rapid reaction force working along with national armies while establishing a finance minister, budget and parliament for the Eurozone. He also called for a new tax on technology giants, an EU-wide asylum agency to deal with the refugee crisis, and changes to the Common Agricultural Policy.
President Macron supports NATO and its role in the security of eastern European states and he also said pressure NATO partners like Poland to uphold what he called "European values". He said in April 2017 that "in the three months after I'm elected, there will be a decision on Poland. You cannot have a European Union which argues over every single decimal place on the issue of budgets with each country, and which, when you have an EU member which acts like Poland or Hungary on issues linked to universities and learning, or refugees, or fundamental values, decides to do nothing." Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said in response that Macron "violated European standards and the principles of friendship with Poland".
During a press conference with Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles in May 2017, he condemned the Russian state media as "lying propaganda." At the same month, he said that "we all know who Le Pen’s allies are. The regimes of Orbán, Kaczyński, Putin. These aren’t the regimes with an open and free democracy. Every day they break many democratic freedoms."
In July 2017, while at a ceremony at the site of the Vélodrome d'Hiver where 13,000 Jews had been rounded up for deportation to death camps in July 1942, Macron denounced his country's role in the Holocaust and the historical revisionism that denied France's responsibility for the 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup and the eventual deportation of 76,000 Jews. Earlier that year, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, had stated in speeches that the government during WWII "was not France".
In August 2017, a photojournalist was arrested and detained by the police for six hours after he entered the private residence where Macron was vacationing in Marseille. Macron subsequently filed a complaint for "harassment." In September 2017, he dropped the complaint "as a gesture of appeasement."
On 27 August 2017, President Macron and his wife Brigitte adopted Nemo, a black Labrador Retriever-Griffon dog who lives with them in the Élysée Palace. As a schoolboy, Macron took the decision to be baptized as a Catholic. In June 2018, prior to meeting Pope Francis, he identified himself as an Agnostic Catholic. In the same year he accepted being made an honorary canon of St John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome.