About this election
The 2017 French presidential election, held over two rounds on 23 April and 7 May 2017, was one of the most consequential in the history of the Fifth Republic. It ended in victory for Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former economy minister who had never previously held elected office and who had launched his own centrist movement, En Marche!, barely a year earlier. His election broke the decades-old alternation between the centre-left Socialists and the centre-right Gaullists: for the first time, neither of the two parties that had governed France since 1958 reached the second round.
The President of the French Republic is elected by direct universal suffrage using a two-round majority system. To win in the first round a candidate must obtain an absolute majority of votes cast; since this has never happened, the two best-placed candidates advance to a run-off held a fortnight later. The president serves a five-year term (the quinquennat, introduced in 2000) and, since 2008, may serve no more than two consecutive terms. The office is the dominant institution of the Fifth Republic, controlling foreign and defence policy and able to dissolve the National Assembly.
The campaign was extraordinarily turbulent. The incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, became the first president of the Fifth Republic to decline to seek re-election, his popularity having collapsed. The centre-right primary winner, François Fillon, began as the favourite but was engulfed by the "Penelopegate" scandal over fictitious parliamentary jobs for his wife. The Socialist primary produced a left-wing candidate, Benoît Hamon, who was then squeezed by the surging radical-left tribune Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Into this vacuum stepped Macron, positioning himself as a pro-European, pro-business reformer "neither of the left nor the right", while Marine Le Pen sought to detoxify and broaden the far-right Front National.
The first round on 23 April produced the closest top four in modern French history. Macron led with 24.01%, ahead of Marine Le Pen on 21.30%, François Fillon on 20.01% and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 19.58% — barely 4.4 points separating first from fourth. Benoît Hamon collapsed to 6.36%, a humiliation for the governing Socialists, while Nicolas Dupont-Aignan took 4.70%. Turnout was 77.77%. The result confirmed the meltdown of the established parties and set up a run-off between a liberal centrist and the far right.
In the run-off on 7 May, Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen by 66.10% to 33.90% — a clear, almost two-to-one victory, though Le Pen's score roughly doubled her father Jean-Marie Le Pen's 17.79% when he had reached the 2002 run-off against Jacques Chirac. Macron, at 39, became the youngest French head of state since Napoleon. Turnout fell to 74.56%, and a record number of voters cast blank or spoilt ballots, a sign of reluctance among those who backed neither finalist.
Macron's victory was completed a month later when his movement, renamed La République En Marche, won a landslide majority in the June legislative elections, giving him a free hand to pursue labour-market, tax and pension reforms. His presidency would be marked by the Gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protests, the COVID-19 pandemic and a hardening of the political confrontation with the Rassemblement National, which he would face again in 2022.
The map of the first round showed a fragmented country: Macron led in the west, the big cities and much of the Atlantic seaboard, Mélenchon topped the Mediterranean and overseas areas, and Marine Le Pen dominated the de-industrialised north-east and the Mediterranean south, leading in regions such as Hauts-de-France, Grand Est and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. In the run-off Macron carried every metropolitan region, winning most by wide margins, while Le Pen's strongest second-round scores remained concentrated in the north-east and the south-east.
Official results from the French Ministry of the Interior, as proclaimed by the Constitutional Council — interieur.gouv.fr. The regional map is built from the ministry's results-by-region files.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.