“Then at the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] has been very vocal about all the tariffs they want to bring back, it looks like we are going back to the pre-Macron era,” Varza said. She pointed to France in 2012 “les doves” (or “fools”) movementa campaign of angry internet entrepreneurs protesting Socialist Party president François Hollande’s plan to significantly raise taxes for founders.
Maya Noël, CEO of France Digitale, an industry group for startups, is concerned not only about France’s ability to attract foreign talent but also about how attractive the next government will be to foreign investors. In February, Google said it would open a new AI center in Paris, housing 300 researchers and engineers. Three months later, Microsoft followed suit. announced record investment of $4 billion in French AI infrastructure. Meta already has one AI Research Lab in Paris since 2015. Today, France is very attractive for foreign investors, she said. “And we need them.” Neither Google nor Meta responded to WIRED’s request for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.
The vote would not unseat Macron—a presidential election is not scheduled until 2027—but the outcome could significantly reshape the lower house of France’s parliament, the National Assembly, and appoint a prime minister from either the far-right or left-wing coalition. That would throw the government into uncertainty, raising the risk of gridlock. In the past 60 years, there have only been three instances of a president being forced to govern with a prime minister from the opposition party, an arrangement known in France as “cohabitation.”
No AI startup has benefited more from the Macron era than Mistral, which counts Cédric O, a former digital minister in Macron’s government, among its co-founders. Mistral has not commented publicly on the choice France faces in the election. The closest the company has come to sharing its views was Cédric O’s decision last week to retweet an X post by entrepreneur Gilles Babinet that read: “I hate the far right, but the economic program of the left is bizarre.” When WIRED asked Mistral about the retweet, the company said O was not a spokesperson and declined to comment.
Babinet, a member of the government Artificial Intelligence Committee, said he had heard that colleagues were considering leaving France. “Some programmers I know from Senegal, from Morocco, are already planning their next move,” he said, adding that people have also reached out to him for help with extensions. visas early in case this becomes more difficult under a far-right government.
While other industries are quietly rushing to support the far right as a preferable alternative to the left-wing coalition, according to reportBabinet downplays the threat posed by the New Popular Front. “It is clear that they are applying very outdated economic rules and therefore they do not understand the new economy at all,” he says. But after speaking to members of the New Popular Front, he says the far left is a minority in the coalition. “Most of them are Social Democrats, and so they know from their experience that when François Hollande came to power, he tried to raise taxes on technology, but it failed miserably.”
There was a sense of damage control, as the industry tried to reassure outsiders that everything would be okay. Babinet pointed to other moments of political turmoil that industries have weathered. “Brexit, in the end, was not a nightmare for the UK tech scene,” he said. The UK remains the preferred place to launch a generative AI startup, according to Accel. report.
Stanislas Polu, an OpenAI alumnus who launched the French AI startup Dust last year, agrees that the industry has enough momentum to overcome any obstacles. “Some of the outcomes could be a little bit bleak,” he said, adding that he expects personal finances to take a hit. “It’s always a little more complicated to navigate in a more volatile environment. I guess we’re hoping that more moderate people will run the country. I think that’s all we can hope for.”
