Paris - (AFP) - Emmanuel Macron, with his divisive positions and style of exercising governance, shocked many Frenchmen who considered him disconnected from their reality, but he scored points at the international level in European challenges and issues related to memory.

Macron, whom the French accuse of arrogance, spent five years in office marked by his ability to change and adapt his policies as needed, in a manner that prompted Le Monde newspaper to compare him to a "chameleon".

And from an obscure figure who had never been elected to any public office, he became Minister of the Economy in the government of former Socialist President Francois Hollande, then the youngest president to enter the Elysee Palace in 2017, when he was still thirty-nine years old.

The ambitious young man knew how to draw an image of himself coming from outside the traditional arena of left and right, and capable of playing with skill on the chord of the fragmentation of the traditional parties in the Fifth Republic.

He surrounded himself with a loyal team based on young men in their thirties who built their experience in the fields of advertising, consulting and management positions.

The former banker, a graduate of the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the almost obligatory path for every aspirant to assume high public responsibility in France, has always shown his desire to surprise and even shock.

Early on, the title of "president of the wealthy" and urban elites stuck to him, especially after two decisions he made at the beginning of his presidential term that the left did not accept at all: abolishing the wealth tax and reducing housing subsidies.

In the eyes of some of the French, public positions and statements he made indicate his separation from their daily lives, such as his talk about people who "are worth nothing," or his consideration that the unemployed may find a job by simply "crossing the street."

Macron thus aroused irreversible aversion among some left and popular circles.

And he stressed, during a television interview in December, that he had gained "a lot of respect for everyone," admitting that in the absence of that, "we cannot move anything."

The remarks he made were not limited to social classes or political currents opposing his views.

In 2020, in the midst of warnings and fears of climate change, he drew criticism from environmental experts after he mocked those who preferred to "return to the kerosene lamp."

His close relationship with the advisory offices on which he relied greatly harmed his image at the end of a presidential term that was unambiguously marked by the “yellow vest” protests against his social policies in 2018 and 2019.

The violence that took place during these protests, especially the number of people who were blinded in their eyes by the fire of the security forces, shocked some of the French.

Macron also made risky bets during his tenure, such as his refusal in January 2021 to impose a new comprehensive lockdown called for by ministers and scholars in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this decision was ultimately in his favor.

Despite this, Macron ends his term enjoying greater popularity than his predecessors, Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, enjoyed - during the same period.

Macron sought to expand his popularity base, especially in the last stages.

He moved away from his liberal reformist leanings and chose to provide massive social and economic assistance during the pandemic, placing it within the framework of the equation of helping the French “whatever the cost.”

Recently, he has returned to repeating the phrase "at the same time," which he repeated repeatedly during his election campaign in 2017, and pushed the social measures in his program to the fore, at a time when it seems that the direction of the left's votes may be decisive in determining the winner in the second round of the presidential elections between him. And his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen.

And it came to him to confirm during an election rally in the city of Nantes, western France, that "our lives are more valuable than their profits," a slogan raised by the extreme left.

Macron kept to the sidelines on some ideological issues, but never deviated from the pro-European ones. He has made the continent the mainstay of his diplomacy for the past five years, and is pushing for a boost in European defence.

Since the start of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Macron has remained the most communicative leader with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and plays a mediating role between the Kremlin on the one hand and Western leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the other.

The outgoing president pushed French society towards conciliatory steps with its history of issues that remained intractable for decades.

His tenure witnessed a remarkable rapprochement between Paris and Kigali after he published in 2021 a report by the Committee of Historians prepared at his request, acknowledging that France bears a "great and grave responsibility" in the genocide of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994.

He also took initiatives to reconcile with the memory of the Algerian war, acknowledging that the mathematician Maurice Audin was killed under torture, and that the national lawyer Ali Bumengel was "tortured and killed" by the French army, contradicting the official version of his suicide.

Last year, he asked for "forgiveness" from the Algerian activists who fought in the ranks of the French army during the Algerian war, and who were "abandoned" by France.

In February 2017, Emmanuel Macron, who was then a candidate for the presidential elections, denounced the right and the French returning from Algeria after declaring that colonialism was a "crime against humanity."

At the beginning of 2022, he expressed his country's "gratitude" to the French who returned from Algeria, and called for recognition of the "two massacres" of shooting that took place on Islay Street in Algeria in 1962, and in Oran in 1962, after the signing of the "Evian" agreements.

Macron, the first post-colonial French president, has also worked to improve relations with African countries.