About this election
The 2022 French presidential election, held over two rounds on 10 and 24 April 2022, returned Emmanuel Macron to the Élysée Palace for a second term, making him the first French president to be re-elected since Jacques Chirac in 2002 and the first to do so outside the cohabitation circumstances of the past. As in 2017, the run-off pitted Macron against Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National, but the margin narrowed sharply, confirming the far right's steady advance.
The president is elected by direct universal suffrage in a two-round system: an absolute majority is required to win in the first round, failing which the two leading candidates contest a run-off two weeks later. The term is five years, renewable once consecutively. Because the presidential election sets the tone for the legislative elections that follow weeks later, its outcome shapes the entire five-year political cycle.
The campaign unfolded against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and, in its final weeks, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which initially boosted the incumbent as a wartime statesman and compressed the campaign. The field of twelve candidates was dominated by three figures: Macron, defending his record; Le Pen, running a softer, cost-of-living-focused campaign; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose radical-left La France Insoumise absorbed much of the left. A new far-right contender, the polemicist Éric Zemmour of Reconquête, fragmented the nationalist vote, while the traditional parties — Valérie Pécresse for Les Républicains and Anne Hidalgo for the Socialists — were reduced to also-rans.
On 10 April, Macron led with 27.85%, ahead of Marine Le Pen on 23.15% and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came agonisingly close to the run-off on 21.95%. Éric Zemmour took 7.07%, Valérie Pécresse a catastrophic 4.78% and Yannick Jadot of the Greens 4.63%. The combined collapse of Les Républicains and the Socialists — together below 7% — confirmed the tripartite reshaping of French politics into a Macronist centre, a Mélenchon-led left and a Le Pen-led nationalist right. Turnout was 73.69%.
In the run-off on 24 April, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected with 58.55% to Marine Le Pen's 41.45%. It was a comfortable win, but Le Pen's score was the highest the far right had ever achieved in a French presidential election, up more than eight points on 2017 and a sign that the "republican front" against the Rassemblement National was weakening. Turnout fell to 71.99%, with abstention and blank ballots at their highest in a presidential run-off since 1969.
Macron's second-term mandate proved far weaker than his first. In the legislative elections that June his Ensemble coalition lost its absolute majority, leaving him to govern with a hung parliament and frequent recourse to the constitution's article 49.3. The deeply contested 2023 pension reform, raising the retirement age to 64, triggered months of protest. The narrowing of the presidential margin and the far right's record score framed the volatile politics of the rest of the term.
The first-round map again showed three Frances: Macron strongest in the west, Brittany, the Paris region's affluent core and the cities; Mélenchon dominant in Île-de-France's working-class suburbs, the overseas territories and parts of the Mediterranean; and Le Pen leading across the de-industrialised north-east, the rural Mediterranean and Corsica. In the run-off Le Pen carried several regions outright — Hauts-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and Corsica — while Macron held the rest, his strongest results in the west and the capital.
Official results from the French Ministry of the Interior, 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.