Central Paris came to a standstill on Sunday (May 14) for the inauguration of Emmanuel Macron as president of France for a five-year term.
Macron overcame the odds to win an election, saying he can unite a divided nation.
In a first for the world’s fifth largest economy that is a founding member of the European Union, the 39-year-old centrist newcomer was unknown to the wider public three years ago and does not belong to any traditional political grouping.
The former investment banker will become the youngest postwar French leader and the first to be born after 1958 when President Charles de Gaulle put in place the country’s fifth Republic.
A 21-gun salute at the Esplanade des Invalides behind the Eiffel Tower after he takes power will mark at least a pause in the anti-globalisation trend that brought Donald Trump the U.S. presidency and led British voters to pick a future outside the European Union.
But the outcome of a fraught, tight, and bitterly contested election campaign was a disappointment for almost half of France’s 47 million voters.
Many of them feel dispossessed as manufacturing jobs move abroad and as immigration and a fast-changing world blur their sense of a French identity.
