The president of France (ex officio also a co-prince of Andorra) is elected by direct popular vote to a five-year term. If the office falls vacant before the end of five years, an election to a new five-year term is held, generally within 20 to 35 days of the vacancy.
In France, constitution mandates that presidents cannot be elected for more than two five-year terms.
Presidential elections were held in France on 26 April 1981, with a second round on 10 May. François Mitterrand defeated incumbent president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to become the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic. It was the first presidential election in French history where an incumbent president actively seeking reelection was denied a second term.
In the first round of voting on 26 April 1981, a political spectrum of ten candidates stood for election, and the leading two candidates – Mitterrand and Giscard d'Estaing – advanced to a second round. Mitterrand and his Socialist Party received 51.76% of the vote, while Giscard and his Union for French Democracy trailed with about 48.24%, a margin of 1,065,956 votes.
Presidential elections were held in France on 21 and 22 April 2007 to elect the successor to Jacques Chirac as president of France (and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra) for a five-year term. As no candidate received a majority of the vote, a second round was held on 5 and 6 May 2007 between the two leading candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal. Sarkozy was elected with 53% of the vote.
Sarkozy and Royal both represented a generational change. Both main candidates were born after World War II, along with the first to have seen adulthood under the Fifth Republic, and the first not to have been in politics under Charles de Gaulle. In addition, Royal was the first woman in France's history to reach the second round in a presidential election.
The Fifth Republic (French: Cinquième République) is France's current republican system of government. It was established on 4 October 1958 by Charles de Gaulle under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.
The Fifth Republic emerged from the collapse of the Fourth Republic, replacing the former parliamentary republic with a semi-presidential (or dual-executive) system that split powers between a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. Charles de Gaulle, who was the first French president elected under the Fifth Republic in December 1958, believed in a strong head of state, which he described as embodying l'esprit de la nation ("the spirit of the nation"). Under the fifth republic, the president has the right to dissolve the national assembly and hold new parliamentary elections. If the president has a majority in the national assembly, the president sets domestic policy and the prime minister puts it into practice. During a presidential mandate, the president can also change prime ministers and reshuffle the government. If there is a different majority in the national assembly, the president is forced to nominate a prime minister from a different party, which is called a cohabitation. In the beginning of the Fifth Republic, presidential elections were held every seventh year and parliamentary elections every fifth year. Starting in the year 2002, the presidential elections (in April) and parliamentary elections (in June) were synchronized to be held every fifth year, which ended in the 2024 French snap election.
Élisabeth Borne ([elizabɛt bɔʁn] ; born 18 April 1961) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from May 2022 to January 2024, becoming the second woman to hold the position of Prime Minister and the first in 30 years. From December 2024 to October 2025, she served as the Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research in the Bayrou government and first Lecornu government. She is a member of President Emmanuel Macron's party Renaissance.
A civil engineer, government official and manager of state enterprises in the transport and construction sectors, Borne previously served as minister of transport (2017–2019) and minister of ecology (2019–2020). She was then minister of labour, employment and integration in the Castex government from 2020 to 2022. On 16 May 2022, President Macron appointed her as the next prime minister after Castex's resignation, as it is the tradition following the presidential elections in France. Borne led the centrist Ensemble coalition into the 2022 legislative election which resulted in a hung parliament: enjoying a 115-seat majority before the election, the ruling coalition was reduced to 251 seats (from 346), still emerging as the largest bloc in Parliament but 38 short of a majority. Unable to broker any deal with opposition parties to form a stable majority administration, Borne officially formed a minority government in July 2022.
Presidential elections were held in France on 21 April 2002, with a runoff election between the top two candidates, incumbent Jacques Chirac of the Rally for the Republic and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, on 5 May. This presidential contest attracted a greater than usual amount of international attention because of candidate Le Pen's unexpected appearance in the runoff election.
Chirac ran for a second term, reduced to five years instead of seven previously by a 2000 referendum, emphasising a strong economy (mostly unaffected by downturns in Germany and the United States). It was widely expected that Chirac and Lionel Jospin, the outgoing cohabitation Prime Minister and nominee of the Socialist Party, would be the most popular candidates in the first round, thus going on to face each other in the runoff, with opinion polls showing a hypothetical Chirac versus Jospin second round too close to call. However, Jospin unexpectedly finished in third place behind Le Pen. Journalists and politicians claimed polls had failed to predict Le Pen's second-place finish in the general election, though his strong stance could be seen in the week prior to the election. This led to serious discussions about polling techniques, the climate of French politics and especially the high numbers of candidates from the left-wing.
Presidential elections were held in France on 22 April 2012 (or 21 April in some overseas departments and territories), with a second round run-off held on 6 May (or 5 May for those same territories) to elect the President of France (who is also ex officio one of the two joint heads of state of Andorra, a sovereign state). The incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy was running for a second five-year term for which he was eligible for under the Constitution of France.
The first round ended with the selection of François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy as second round participants, as neither of them received a majority of votes cast in the first round. Hollande won the runoff with 51.64% of the vote to Sarkozy's 48.36%. Hollande was the former partner of Ségolène Royal, whom Sarkozy defeated five years earlier in 2007. It was the second time in French history and the first time since the 1981 election that a President seeking reelection was denied a second term, and the only time the incumbent seeking reelection did not obtain the most votes in the first round.
Presidential elections were held in France on 24 April and 8 May 1988.
In 1981, the Socialist Party leader, François Mitterrand, was elected President of France and the Left won the legislative election. However, in 1986, the right regained a parliamentary majority. President Mitterrand was forced to "cohabit" with a conservative cabinet led by the RPR leader Jacques Chirac. Chirac took responsibility for domestic policy while the President focused on his "reserved domain" – foreign affairs and defense policy. Moreover, several other prominent candidates opposed the two heads of the executive.
Presidential elections were held in France in 1974, following the death of President Georges Pompidou. They went to a second round, and were won by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing by a margin of 1.6%. It is to date the closest presidential election in French history.