Emmanuel Macron launches outsider bid for French presidency

Emmanuel Macron, France’s former economy minister, has launched an outsider bid for the presidency, promising to lead a people’s “democratic revolution” against a “vacuous” political system.

The former investment banker, 38, is not a member of a political party and has never run for elected office. However, he has promised to blow apart the inadequacies of a governing system that he says has failed the people.

“I have seen from the inside the vacuity of the political system,” Macron thundered in a speech in Bobigny, north of Paris, on Wednesday, referring to the two years he spent as François Hollande’s economy minister, during which he reportedly criticised complacent career politicians for letting ordinary people fall by the wayside. “Our political system is blocked,” he said.

Macron said in Bobigny he wanted to reconcile the people to a more “responsible” governing class and respond to what he called “the divorce between the people and those in charge”.

“The system has ceased to protect those it should protect,” he said, denouncing a political apparatus “that lives for itself, more interested in its own survival than in the interests of the country”.

Macron, who comes from the left, said he wanted to unite people from all backgrounds, and would run on a ticket that was neither left nor right.

The country’s Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has dismissed Macron as “populism light”. Macron said he is simply promoting democracy, interested only in listening to the people and moving beyond the self-interest of careerist politicians and parties.

In his campaign launch, Macron attacked the far-right without naming them, warning against forces “turning in on themselves, towards civil war”, people who “insult and exclude”.

Macron resigned from his post as economy minister this summer to prepare a surprise presidential bid.