With the sitting first-term president not standing and the mainstream parties knocked out in the first round, this race has been unlike any before it

The campaign to elect the Fifth Republic’s eighth president has also been modern France’s most remarkable: a rollercoaster ride of upsets, about-turns, game-changers and historic firsts.

The outgoing first-term president, François Hollande, did not stand. Other big names such as Alain Juppé and Nicolas Sarkozy also fell by the wayside. For the first time, France’s traditional mainstream parties did not reach the runoff.

The poll’s backdrop – a stuttering economy, high unemployment, the anti-establishment shocks of Brexit and Trump, the constant threat of a major terror or cyber attack – set the scene for a unique contest. Here are its highlights.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen campaigning in Pordic, Brittany. Photograph: Langsdon/EPA/Rex/Shutterstock

Early favourites

By the beginning of 2015, the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, was heading the list of possible candidates favoured to win the first round of the two-stage election with anything up to 33% of the vote.

As the year wore on the candidate seen as most likely to threaten her first-round dominance was the moderate centre-right veteran and former prime minister Juppé, dubbed France’s “prophet of happiness”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarkozy and Juppé in a debate before their party’s primary in November. Photograph: Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images

Sarkozy, seeking a comeback, was in the mix, but trailing Juppé in the polls. By autumn 2016, Juppé, by now France’s most popular politician, was seen edging Le Pen in the first round and routing her in the runoff.

Macron enters the race

In November 2016, days before the primary for the centre-right nomination that Juppé was forecast to win, Emmanuel Macron, a former Rothschild’s banker and economy minister, launched his independent bid for the presidency.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emmanuel Macron campaigning in Nantes. Photograph: Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images

At the head of the youthful new En Marche! movement, the 39-year-old centrist, who resigned from Hollande’s government in August, claimed to be neither of the left nor the right: an economic liberal, but firmly on the left socially.

He aimed to blow apart a “vacuous” political system and remake French politics, he said. This was bold. No centrist, and especially no candidate running without a party or previous electoral experience, had ever won.



The centre-right primary

The first round of Les Républicains party’s primary was held on 20 November. To the shock of many, François Fillon, Sarkozy’s much put-upon prime minister, came top with 44% of the vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A poster for Fillon is put up before a rally in Lille. Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

This was the humiliating end of Sarkozy’s putative comeback. Fillon, a social conservative whose platform included state-shrinking and Thatcher-style economic reforms, went on to win the nomination comfortably and immediately became favourite to win the presidency.

Hollande pulls out

Days later on 1 December, and with polls showing he would win only 7.5% of the vote in the first round, the embattled Hollande gave up the fight, saying he wanted to avoid the risk his candidacy might pose for the left.

While not entirely unexpected, this was a major upset. Hollande will go down in history as the first living French president since the second world war not to attempt to stand for re-election.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest François Hollande. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/Pool/EPA

Penelopegate

On 25 January, Le Canard Enchaîné weekly published the first of two exposés alleging Fillon had placed his Welsh-born wife, Penelope, and two of their children on the public payroll in apparently fake jobs that earned the family nearly €900,000 before taxes over 15 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Penelope and François Fillon. Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

Further allegations followed, that Fillon got a billionaire friend to pay Penelope for a non-job on a literary magazine, accepted gifts of expensive suits and watches, took undeclared loans and earned €1m from a shady consultancy.

Despite denying all wrongdoing - though he admitted to “errors” - and denouncing a leftist plot, the scandal weakened Fillon, who had presented himself as upright and above reproach. On 30 January, Macron overtook him in the polls and stayed there.

The Socialist primary – and another first

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Benoît Hamon. Photograph: Julien de Rosa/EPA

In the Socialist party primary runoff on 29 January, Benoît Hamon, a leftwing rebel who favoured a universal basic income, legalising cannabis and taxing robots, beat the centrist, more pro-business prime minister Manuel Valls.

This was not only a damning indictment of Hollande’s failed presidency but, with Hamon rapidly forecast to bomb in the first round vote and Le Pen and Macron now clear frontrunners, reflected a radical new reality.

There was now a very real chance that neither of the traditional centre-right and centre-left parties that have governed France since the 1950s would be represented in the second round of a presidential election.

On 22 February, Macron’s campaign received an unexpected boost with the backing of the veteran centrist François Bayrou.

Fillon clings on

Despite having promised to step aside if he was ever charged, Fillon stayed in the race and on 14 March became the first major candidate to run for France’s highest office while under formal investigation for misusing state funds.

He had wobbled in preceding weeks, as increasing numbers of supporters including dozens of MPs and senators abandoned his campaign and urged him to withdraw, warning he was leading the party to certain electoral disaster.

But, still railing against a foul plot by magistrates, government and media and after staging a successful Paris rally, he secured the unanimous support of the political committee of Les Républicains for his candidacy on 6 March.

There was, he said, “no plan B” if he stepped down. Helpfully, Juppé, long considered the plan B, agreed, lamenting a “tragic” lost electoral opportunity for the party.

Mélenchon’s charge

In any other election, revelations that Le Pen was also being investigated for misuse of funds (European, this time), and that prosecutors had asked for her MEPs’ immunity to be lifted, would have been big news.

Not in this one. A late surprise was the sudden surge of the far-left veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon, unexpectedly lifted into contention by some fiery oratory and a couple of winning performances in TV debates.

His rise meant four leading candidates went into the fraught 23 April first round separated by only a handful of points in the polls, with any two looking capable of advancing to the runoff.

Terror on the Champs-Elysées

Two days before polls opened a known terror suspect previously convicted of the attempted murder of two policemen shot dead an officer and severely wounded two others on Paris’s most famous avenue in an attack claimed by Islamic State.

With security a key theme of the election following the deaths of more than 230 people in France in a string of terror attacks since 2015, there were fears the incident might have a significant impact on the first round vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armed police on the Champs-Elysées the day after the shooting. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

And then there were two

In the event (and in line with French pollsters’ remarkably accurate predictions), Macron and Le Pen finished on 24.01% and 21.3% respectively and went through to the 7 May runoff. The mainstream centre left and right were out.

What had already been the most bruising and divisive presidential campaign in living memory hit a new low on 3 May, when the finalists faced off in an ugly and ill-tempered two-and-a-half-hour TV debate watched by 16 million people.

Le Pen was widely criticised for spending more time belittling and attacking her rival than engaging with policy. The polls, which had consistently suggested Macron would win the run off by a margin of about 20 points, swung further his way.

Hack attack

Then, just hours before all campaigning halted at midnight on 5 May, Macron’s team announced it had been the target of a “massive and coordinated” hack that dumped tens of thousands of real and fake campaign documents onto the internet.

The attack was denounced as clearly an “attempt to influence the democratic process”, and compared to those that disrupted last year’s US presidential race and that Hillary Clinton has said may have played a part in her defeat.

But under strict rules barring all political comment on the eve of the election, no one could say much more – and French media were warned not to publish the leaks’ contents until after the vote. It was the final twist in a tumultuous campaign.