The voters, who brought him to power in 2017 without really knowing him, gradually discovered the multifaceted personality, and the desire to remain unclassifiable of the one who had wanted to be a candidate outside the parties.

Propelled to the top of the state at the age of 39 - a youth record - with 66% of the votes cast, his base was nevertheless fragile since his 20.7 million votes included in part a vote of rejection of Marine Le Pen, against a background record number of abstentions.

Alternately close and distant, this enarque and ex-investment banker at Rothschild, ex-minister of the Economy of François Hollande whom he supplanted, turns out to be less rational than expected.

The French see him prone to surprising stubbornness, as when he refuses to dismiss his trusted man Alexandre Benalla, author of a violent punch against demonstrators.

Emmanuel Macron and his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla during an interview on TF1 at the Elysee Palace in Paris on December 15, 2021 Ludovic MARIN AFP / Archives

Also capable of poker moves, as when he launched his great marathon debates after the riots of the "Yellow Vests", where this hypermnesic juggled for hours with the most technical questions.

He also refuses a new confinement demanded by experts and ministers in January 2021. And he imposes in July 2021, the first in Europe, a health pass not far from a vaccination obligation.

The French also see him getting bogged down in repeated clumsiness, these little murderous phrases about the unemployed who would only have to "cross the street" to find a job, about social aid which costs "crazy dough" , against French "refractory Gauls" or journalists "who no longer seek the truth".

His supporters rave about his intelligence or his capacity for work.

His enemies consider him arrogant and a lecturer, to the point of arousing a form of hatred.

As with these "Yellow Vests" who hung him in effigy or shouted death threats at Le Puy-en-Velay in 2018.

Demonstration of yellow vests in Lyon on January 5, 2019 ROMAIN LAFABREGUE AFP / Archives

He remains out of step with the French.

His private life, this fusional couple that he forms with his wife Brigitte, 24 years his senior, continues to amaze some of them.

- Scramble the cards -

The French have struggled to identify both his personality and his "at the same time" policy, a mixture of liberal ingredients, such as the abolition of the ISF, and floods of social aid disbursed after the "Yellow Vests" or the Covid epidemic.

But he, who wants to be pragmatic, sees in it precisely an all-out action.

Unclassifiable, he wants to be, by advocating the overcoming of the left-right divide and by blurring the cards, at the risk of favoring extreme opponents.

For the former figure of the left Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who has called in recent days to vote for him, "macronism does not exist. There is Emmanuel Macron, who is a free being, who thinks for himself and who decides.

Jean-Pierre Chevènement in front of the statue of Georges Clemenceau in Paris November 11, 2016 PHILIPPE WOJAZER POOL/AFP/Archives

In five years, the young man has changed, marked by a succession of crises, from the Covid epidemic to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict which turned the last weeks of his five-year term upside down.

His features have deepened, his words are more cautious.

However, he kept intact his ambitions for reforms in France and in Europe, as well as his credo of individual success through hard work.

But advance less abruptly.

"I was saber clear," he admitted last year, "It seemed like I wanted to reform against people. You have to get them on board."

His entourage also changed, with the departure of the "Mormons", this band of thirty-year-olds who formed his campaign team, one by one far from the Elysée.

The only ones who have remained since his beginnings are his two pillars: his very influential wife Brigitte, and his right arm, the indispensable and secret secretary general of the Elysée Palace Alexis Kohler.

The secretary general of the Elysée Alexis Kohler January 6, 2021 in Paris Ludovic MARIN AFP / Archives

As a disciple of Machiavelli, he allows the various clans fighting for his attention to clash and draws from their proposals for his future program.

But as in 2017, he still thinks, according to those close to him, that a presidential election is a meeting between a man and the French.

And that he will therefore win alone.

© 2022 AFP