Could Macron and Brexit make France Europe’s tech capital? 🇫🇷

Source: Could Macron and Brexit make Paris Europe’s tech capital?

FRANCE 24

Date created : 13/04/2019 – 18:14Latest update : 15/04/2019 – 08:23

Ludovic Marin/AFP | French President Emmanuel Macron speaks as he visits the start-up campus Station F on October 9, 2018.

This article’s original headline and content focused only on a very large, high profile startup incubator in Paris, but frankly, there is a lot more going on in other parts of France as well.

Text by:Charlotte WILKINS

Shortly after his election in May 2017, President Macron said he wanted France itself “to think and move like a start-up” – a vision of the country’s digital future that is gaining traction as Britain wrestles with Brexit.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s vow to make France a ‘start-up nation’ amid the uncertainty over Brexitis raising the question of whether Paris could supplant London as the capital of European tech.

Since his election, Macron has wooed tech entrepreneurs with a string of initiatives in the form of lavish tax breaks, subsidies, and credits for research. In March 2018, he promised to invest €1.5 billion into artificial intelligence research through 2022.

Some of these initiatives, in addition to Macron’s dynamism, have lured British tech companies who are looking to gain a foothold in Europe.

“It made sense to have a European base,” said Cedric Jones*, a Briton who recently launched a start-up at Station F, the cavernous old train station that is now home to the world’s largest start-up campus. “If I’m going to make waves in continental Europe… I wanted to get here before Brexit happened.”

Jones is among dozens of foreign entrepreneurs who have recently launched their start-up at Station F, whose 3,000 desk hub has seen spiraling applications from English-speaking nationals in the last two years.

Some cite political woes back home, the burgeoning French tech sector, or are inspired by Macron’s bid to make Paris the innovation heart of Europe.

“There’s an air of optimism and a can-do spirit in France that I feel we’ve lost somewhat in the US,” said Mark Heath, a New Yorker, who stayed on in France to launch a start-up after studying at INSEAD in 2017.

The Macron effect

Much of the investment in French tech predates Macron’s reforms. The state investment bank Bpifrance, launched by former French president François Hollande in 2013, has been widely credited with developing the sector. Hollande also set up new foreign visas for start-up entrepreneurs.

But Zahir Bouchaary, a Briton who works out of Station F, credits Macron with injecting dynamism into the sector.

“Macron has installed a [start-up] mentality within the French ecosystem itself,” said Bouchaary, adding that it has become much easier to do business in France in the last few years.

“French customers are a lot more willing to work with start-ups than they were before,” said Bouchaary. “France was a very conservative country and our clients were used to working with big old-fashioned companies that have been around for a while. For the past few years, they’ve opened up a lot more to working with younger companies and seem to take more risks than they did before.”

Jones agreed that Macron was “the single variable”. “When he [Macron] goes, the dynamism will go too. I absolutely would not expect that to remain the case if he’s not the president.”

However, although Macron has moved to ease labour laws, Jones said that navigating the country’s labyrinthine bureaucracy in French remained “very burdensome”, and that it was far easier to build a business in the UK. “Whether it’s from a tax perspective or from a legal perspective it’s just so much more complicated.”

UK tech ‘resilient’

The tech scene in London appears to be just as vibrant as ever, explained Albin Serviant, president of Frenchtech in London, who said many UK-based tech entrepreneurs are adopting a “wait and see” approach to Brexit.

“The UK ecosystem is quite resilient,” said Serviant.

“In the first quarter of 2019, there were about €2 billion invested in tech in London. That’s compared to 1.5 billion last year, which is plus 30 percent. And that’s twice as much as France – which invested 1 billion. France is catching up very fast but the investment money is still flowing in the UK,” he added.

Serviant cited London’s business-friendly ecosystem and international talent pool as reasons for why London remains the capital of the European tech sector. Barcelona and Berlin are also contenders for the UK’s tech start-up crown.

Nonetheless, Serviant cautioned against the effects that a hard Brexit would have on the tech sector in the UK.

“‘If Brexit happens in a bad way and if people like me and other entrepreneurs have to leave, obviously that’s very bad for the UK because what makes it very different is the international DNA of London.”

Hard Brexit would not just damage the UK tech sector but would also pose challenges for British developers, who post-Brexit may need a carte de séjour to work in the country, looking to find work in France.

Sarah Pedroza, co-managing director of Hello Tomorrow technologies, a Paris-based startup NGO, said that if she had to choose between hiring a British national and an EU citizen with the same skillset, she would opt for an EU citizen because there would be less paperwork involved.

Brexit aside, others suggest that France is snapping at the UK’s technological heels.

“I do think France has the potential under Macron to close the gap with the UK,” said Jones.

“The single biggest factor in what’s going on for France is that France is developing a sense of confidence in itself, in its start-up scene, as a tech hub, that’s being helped by France and that’s also being helped by Brexit.”

Boris Johnson is a clown who has united the EU against Britain

The Foreign Secretary’s clumsiness and ignorance has undermined his own country’s exit strategy

‘Johnson does not seem to grasp that it takes a mind with a rare degree of finesse to be able to combine humour and diplomacy.’

The Guardian

Source: Boris Johnson is a clown who has united the EU against Britain | Jean Quatremer | Opinion | The Guardian

Friday 25 November 2016 13.36 GMTLast modified on Friday 25 November 2016 14.36 GMT

Britain can be proud of itself. Once again, it had already shown the world the way. In propelling Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to triumph on 23 June, it demonstrated well before 8 November that Donald Trump was nothing new.

In fact foolishness, vulgarity, inconsistency, and irresponsibility seem actually to be British inventions that have been painstakingly copied – once more – by the Americans.

The age of such drab characters as Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron is over. No more, it appears, must we suffer leaders equipped with a brain and a sense of the common interest. The hour of the political clown has come.

In a few short weeks, Boris Johnson, the former journalist – for whom facts were never an obstacle likely to get in the way of a good story – has succeeded in squandering what little sympathy and understanding was left in Europe for a Great Britain embroiled in the mess of this referendum.

It is quite some diplomatic achievement to have succeeded in uniting, as never before, the 27 remaining members of the European Union – including Germany and the Netherlands – who are all now firmly together in deciding to do the UK no favours whatsoever.

It will be a “hard Brexit” not because that is what Theresa May wants, but because her future ex-partners consider they have no choice faced with a Great Britain so resolutely indecisive.

There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Nick Cohen

Johnson has deeply annoyed his continental partners by displaying, firstly, his complete ignorance of the union (perhaps not altogether surprising if you knew him as a “journalist” in Brussels, as I did). According to his very personal interpretation of the European treaties, it is “bollocks” to say that the four fundamental freedoms (free movement of people, goods, services and capital) are inseparable.

“Everybody now has it in their head that every human being has some fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want,” he said earlier this month.

For Johnson, here there can of course be a “dynamic trade relationship and we will take back control of our borders, but we remain an open and welcoming society”.

Yet the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, warned him very clearly as early as September. “We’ll happily send Her Majesty’s foreign minister a copy of the Lisbon treaty,” he said. “He can then read about the fact that there’s a certain connection between the single market and the four freedoms. At a pinch, I can talk about it in English.”

Schäuble reiterated on 18 November that there “will be no à la carte menu. There is only the whole menu or none.” His Dutch colleague Jeroen Dijsselbloem, meanwhile, hammered the message home: Johnson is spouting stuff that is “intellectually impossible” and “politically unachievable”.

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Boris Johnson stuck on a zip line during his time as mayor of London. Photograph: Barcroft Media

Nevertheless, Johnson repeats his mantra ad infinitum: he is right, and the others are all wrong. The problem, however, is that at the end of the day it is the others who will decide. And if you want something from someone, it is generally wiser to avoid telling them they are an idiot.

But the foreign secretary adds clumsiness to ignorance. Johnson – who has, remember, written a biography of Winston Churchill – does not seem to grasp that it takes a mind with a rare degree of finesse to be able to combine humour and diplomacy.

His quip that the Italians would sell less prosecco to Britain if the UK was not able to stay in the single market not only created a diplomatic incident, but underlined the obvious weakness of the British argument: if the EU risks losing access to a market of 64 million Brits, Britain will lose access to a market of 440 million Europeans.

Stay out of EU affairs, leading MEP tells British government

And last but not least, Johnson, who himself raised the spectre of hordes of Turkish citizens arriving in the UK if it stayed in the union, now steps up as as the most ardent defender there is of Ankara joining the EU – even if it reintroduces the death penalty.

“I can no longer respect this,” raged the normally placid Manfred Weber, leader of the conservative EPP group in the European parliament. “When you want to leave a club, you have no say anymore in the long-term future of this club.”

A famous French screenwriter Michel Audiard coined a phrase in the early 1960s that applies perfectly to Johnson: “Les cons, ça ose tout, c’est même à ça qu’on les reconnaît.” This means, roughly: “Fools” (to choose a relatively inoffensive rendering) “will try anything – that’s how you know they’re fools.”

The foreign secretary, who like Trump is no fan of beating about the bush, will pardon my familiarity. Or perhaps not.

Italy, Austria, and France Likely Next To Join Global Populist Tsunami

Why some of Europe’s top leaders are walking dead

Italy, Austria, and France, in that order, are the next dominos likely to fall in the global wave of populist political sentiment. Italy and Austria will both go to the polls on the same day next month, December 4th, for somewhat different reasons, but with both outcomes likely to advance the political forces on the right in Europe. In Austria, it’s expected that Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party will prevail. That would make him the first elected far-right leader in Western Europe since 1945.  Italy’s vote is a referendum initially scheduled for the fall. On the table is a package of constitutional reforms that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has proposed to streamline lawmaking, but it is increasingly being seen a plebiscite on Renzi’s government, which it appears he may lose, causing his government to fall, and creating an opportunity for the far right to form a new anti-immigration government. In the upcoming 2017 Presidential election in France, ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen is seen as the possible front-runner.

 

An especially vote-heavy year lies ahead in Europe, with potentially heavy political casualties. Millions of people are heading to the polls and many are in an agitated mood.

Source: Taking aim at the establishment: Why some of Europe’s top leaders are walking dead – World – CBC News

Millions of voters have a chance soon to clobber the establishment as Trump supporters did

By Nahlah Ayed, CBC News Posted: Nov 13, 2016 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Nov 13, 2016 12:09 PM ET

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen arrives in Nanterre on Nov. 9 to make a statement on the U.S. election. 

If you were surprised by the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, you might want to brace yourself for the cartwheels of change about to roll across Europe.

Because of an unusual set of circumstances, ahead is an especially vote-heavy year with potentially heavy political casualties. Millions of people are heading to the polls, and many are in an agitated mood.

The lineup of elections and referendums is a wide-open opportunity for mass venting about the many frustrations of the past years: the migration crisis, the economic crisis, the bailouts, and fallout, in a flailing European Union.

Like Nov. 8 in the U.S. — and June 23 with Brexit — the succession of polls is also a chance to clobber the establishment.

Naturally, Europe’s anti-establishment protest parties stand to reap the benefits of the discontent.

At risk are some of Europe’s top leaders, now suddenly among the political walking dead.

French President Francois Hollande leaves after making a statement in Paris on Nov. 9 about the results of the U.S. election. 

By this time next year, the world’s most powerful gatherings could look very different. Donald Trump aside, rarely before has the prospect for change in the international arena been so sweeping.

Even before Trump’s triumph, Europe’s political house looked set for an overhaul. The winds of change were already blowing in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and elsewhere.

Gales in opposition sails

But Trump’s winning bluster is now putting gales in the sails of Europe’s populists and nationalists riding the anti-establishment mood.

“The French reaction was: absolutely, this is a huge boost to [populist National Front leader] Marine Le Pen,” says Xenia Wickett, the head of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank.

“The prospect of a Le Pen government in Paris is very, very real.”

• Rancid small-state nationalism surges

Le Pen’s is an anti-immigrant, anti-establishment party. She was one of the first nationalist leaders to congratulate Trump, while her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the party, tweeted, “Today, the United States. Tomorrow, France. Bravo!”

Once on the fringes of France’s political landscape, Le Pen could be one of two candidates in the final run-off for president — and in light of Trump’s victory, France’s elite are now openly musing about the possibility she could actually win next spring, unseating Francois Hollande.

Donald Trump welcomes Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, to speak at a campaign rally in Jackson, Miss., on Aug. 24. 

But the votes that will initially set the tone for Europe’s coming year are happening far sooner, and on a single day.

On Dec. 4, Italy and Austria go to the polls. Neither would normally be on Europe’s agenda this late in the year — putting them squarely, and perhaps ominously, in the American election’s wake.

Austria’s contest is a rerun of an earlier, close presidential vote, and it’s expected that Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party will prevail. That would make him the first elected far-right leader in Western Europe since 1945.

Referendum in Italy

Italy’s vote is a referendum initially scheduled for the fall. On the table is a package of constitutional reforms that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has proposed to streamline lawmaking.

But because of growing anger over the migration crisis — Italy has become the top destination for asylum seekers — as well as over corruption and dangerously high unemployment, the vote is being seen as a plebiscite on Renzi’s performance. So far it looks like he might lose — and that might bring down his government.

Waiting in the wings is the Five Star Movement, a protest party that wants curbs on migration and a referendum on dumping the euro.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel leads the weekly cabinet meeting in Berlin on Nov. 2. 

Also at risk are several other leaders and governments, some of whom have been around for the better part of a decade.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s popularity and her party have been hurt by the migration crisis and her decision to allow hundreds of thousands of mostly Syrians to enter the country last year.

• ‘Our country. Our culture’: German far right

Her Christian Democratic Union saw support plummet in local elections this year. The beneficiary was again an anti-immigrant party on the rise. The right-wing Alternative for Germany is expected to do well in next year’s national election, too.

Trump’s ‘patriotic spring’

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam and anti-immigrant Freedom Party stands to build on the back of the disillusionment. He may not form the next government after the March vote, but his party’s influence is expected to grow.

He calls Trump’s victory the latest episode of a “patriotic spring.”

While many of these parties are inspired by Trump’s win, it was actually a protest party on this side of the Atlantic that formed the best and perhaps worst model for harnessing the growing malcontent in the West.

• Hungary’s leader would block refugees

The United Kingdom Independence Party, under Nigel Farage, had very little chance of forming a government. But it managed to help force a referendum and motivate the disillusioned to bring Britain to vote to leave the EU — and change the face of Europe.

“I’m the catalyst for the downfall of the Blairites, the Clintonites, the Bushites, and all these dreadful people who work hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and everybody else, have made themselves rich, and ruined our countries,” he said last week.

It is certainly language that is resonating across this continent and across the pond.

Farage, Trump, and others are tapping into a rich vein of discontent that will yet produce many more surprising headlines.

U.S. President Barack Obama meets president-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Nov. 10. 

Trump, Brexit And The Rise of Populism

The Rise of Populism and Cultural Politics: A Reaction to Globalization

The Decline of Economics As the Pivotal Issue of Politics

We are witnessing an extraordinary global upheaval, the outcome of which seems very uncertain at best. In my view, it is a populist reaction to globalization, and a dramatic shift in politics around the World, from economic issues to cultural issues.  I see globalization as ultimately an inevitable evolution of human culture, but which by its very nature and the acceleration in the pace of change with the World Wide Web, is fomenting unrest and reaction. Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian visionary correctly predicted the rise of the “global village” in the 1960’s.  But neither McLuhan nor we foresaw the backlash against the Internet, efforts by China, Russia, Turkey and other countries to block free access to the Internet and simultaneously the rise of xenophobia, racism and economic protectionism. The global economy also has essentially stagnated since the Global Financial Meltdown. This has been a warning of greater issues rising up around the World. Xenophobia, racism, gender issues, freedom of expression, environmentalism, and terrorism have displaced economics as the top political issues. How this all plays out in the “global village” is anyone’s guess, but it is also important to remember the lesson of King Canute, who insisted he could stop the waves.

Backlash Against Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village” Unlikely To Stop The Waves

I am sharing here a seminal editorial on this issue by Fareed Zakaria, of CNN GPS, perhaps the best media program on international politics. Zakaria cites the recent study by Richard Inglehart and Pippa Norris at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, which supports the ideas expressed here. I have also provided a link to the Harvard study.

WHY WE ARE ALL DEPLORABLES NOW

Posted by Fareed Zakaria on September 15, 2016

By Fareed Zakaria
Thursday, September 15, 2016, The Washington Post

Source: Why we are all deplorables now

Whether you put them in a basket or not, the question of this election is: Who are Donald Trump’s supporters? One way to answer that question is to widen its scope beyond the United States. Trump is part of a broad populist trend running across the Western world. Over the past few decades, we have seen the rise of populism — both left- and right-wing — from Sweden to Greece, Denmark to Hungary. In each place, the discussion tends to focus on forces that are particular to each country and its political landscape. But it’s happening in so many countries with so many different political systems, cultures and histories that there must be some common causes.

Harvard Kennedy School of Government Study

While populism is widespread in the West, it is largely absent in Asia, even in the advanced economies of Japan and South Korea. It is actually in retreat in Latin America, where left-wing populists in Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia ran their countries into the ground over the past decade. But in Europe, we have seen a steady and strong rise in populism almost everywhere. In an important research paper for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris calculate that European populist parties of the right and left have gone from 6.7 percent and 2.4 percent of the vote in the 1960s, respectively, to 13.4 percent and 12.7 percent in the 2010s.

Read More:Trump, Brexit and the rise of Populism, Inglehart and Norris, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

The most striking finding of the paper, which points to a fundamental cause of this rise of populism, is the decline of economics as the pivot of politics. The way we think about politics today is still shaped by the basic 20th-century left-right divide. Left-wing parties advocated increased government spending, a larger welfare state and regulations on business. Right-wing parties wanted limited government, fewer safety nets and more laissez-faire policies. Voting patterns reinforced this ideological divide, with the working class voting for the left and the middle and upper classes for the right.

Inglehart and Norris note that the old voting patterns have been waning for decades. “By the 1980s,” they write, “class voting had fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded in Britain, France, Sweden, and West Germany. . . . In the U.S., it had fallen so low [by the 1990s] that there was virtually no room for further decline.” Today, an American’s economic status is a far worse predictor of voting preferences than, say, his or her views on same-sex marriage. The authors also analyzed party platforms in recent decades and found that, since the 1980s, economic issues have become less important. Non-economic issues — social, environmental — have greatly increased in importance.

I wonder whether this is partly because left and right have converged more than ever on economic policy. In the 1960s, the difference between the two sides was vast. The left wanted to nationalize industries; the right wanted to privatize pensions and health care. While politicians on the right continue to make the laissez-faire case, it is largely theoretical. In power, conservatives have accommodated themselves to the mixed economy as liberals have to market forces. The difference between Tony Blair’s policies and David Cameron’s was real but historically marginal.

This period, from the 1970s to today, also coincided with a slowdown in economic growth across the Western world. And in the past two decades, there has been an increasing sense that economic policy cannot do much to fundamentally reverse this slowdown. Voters have noticed that, whether it’s tax cuts, reforms or stimulus plans, public policy seems less powerful in the face of larger forces. As economics declined as the central force defining politics, its place was taken by a grab bag of issues that could be described as “culture.” It began, as Inglehart and Norris note, with young people in the 1960s embracing a post-materialist politics — self-expression, gender, race, environmentalism. This trend then generated a backlash from older voters, particularly men, seeking to reaffirm the values they grew up with. The key to Trump’s success in the Republican primaries was to realize that while the conservative establishment preached the gospel of free trade, low taxes, deregulation and entitlement reform, conservative voters were moved by very different appeals — on immigration, security and identity.

This is the new landscape of politics, and it explains why partisanship is so high, rhetoric so shrill and compromise seemingly impossible. You could split the difference on economics — money, after all, can always be divided. But how do you compromise on the core issue of identity? Each side today holds deeply to a vision of America and believes genuinely that what its opponents want is not just misguided but, well, deplorable.

(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group