🔴 What Digital Policies With Less Than Two Years to Go Before 2027 (and After)?

The idea behind this newsletter is to anticipate how the sector is already preparing, less and less discreetly, for the post-Macron era. An era whose digital ideological engine has yet to be defined.

As I explained in my previous newsletter, I have the feeling that action is more effective outside the official channels. Especially when it comes to thinking and working in depth in a supportive environment.

Two years out from the next presidential election, the French state's digital policies now seem to be on autopilot.

No clear vision: the government carries no strong digital doctrine. The big instruments like France 2030 (the national investment plan) or Bpifrance (the public investment bank) are being redirected toward the defense and sovereignty sectors after having played the reindustrialization card, but it will take time for that strategy to bear fruit.
Zero-political-risk strategy: for now, the aim is to buy time to mask the stupor induced by US economic and diplomatic policy.

In this long transition period before the next presidential election, the future presidential campaign teams are already staffing up and thinking about their platforms, and have already started approaching people in tech.

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This newsletter is something of a user's guide for the next 18 months.

Three digital policy lines being reshaped and competing

Until now, digital was considered a technical or secondary subject. It is now becoming an ideological marker. Musk, Thiel and DOGE have seen to that.

Here are the three directions under study:

On the left, digital is still mostly perceived as a tool for social innovation or the ecological transition. Sovereignty questions are harder to champion: these parties remain historically tied to Big Tech and keep hoping for a return of the Democrats to the White House, which would allow a return to the business as usual of the Macron-Hollande era. For example, the debate over lowering the level of social protection to fund defense, and the acceptance of a transatlantic decoupling, remain hard sells for their voters. That said, we are starting to see interesting strategic divergences, sometimes carried by younger figures or by local elected officials.

On the right, the logic is a return to a structured, more sovereign industrial policy. The goal is no longer to support startups as a priority, but to work with the large groups to strengthen technological sovereignty and the defense effort. It is Bercy's dream vision: the small players are too poorly understood or considered out of scope. Back to a hierarchical approach, based on the weight of the incumbents. It is worth noting that the right is repositioning itself on a segment of the Bush-era American Republicans: big business and national security. It is a new technological and economic bet that also has to convince their voters.

On the far right, digital is now seen as a lever of security and territorial sovereignty. Technology becomes the tool of policy. And if a "security DOGE" were to emerge, it would be possible because the ultra-centralized infrastructure of the platform state allows it. An infrastructure conceived under Hollande, extended under Macron, and which, with no safeguards whatsoever, can today easily be redirected toward managing migration flows, security, and the administration of social benefits. Alongside this, a small number of tech players forgotten by the Startup Nation hope, in the manner of Peter Thiel and Musk with Trump, to reap the commercial benefits of implementing such a program. A new textbook case for the tech world.

What is certain is that in this context, the presidential camp (Emmanuel Macron's and his Prime Minister François Bayrou's) no longer has the upper hand.

All the systems that had been activated to support digital policy are today in degraded mode, or at a complete standstill. In this situation, many people will prefer to stay on the sidelines.

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I can already see it in cyber circles as in tech circles. Many are starting to wonder.

Should they carry on with the current apparatus, or start building new relationships?

This uncertainty also spills over onto senior civil servants, gripped by panic: the prospect of tipping into a political era too polarized to "survive" in by staying compatible with the entire political spectrum.

But this realignment could also open a breach. 2027 will be the first presidential election in which different digital projects, carried by opposing political visions, could offer genuinely divergent models of society.

The current system, of a digital sphere maintaining an apparent neutrality and whose usefulness is exclusively economic, is no longer tenable.

It is both fascinating and worrying, because we are entering a new phase, in which digital will cease to be a technical sub-file managed at the margins and become a fully politicized strategic lever. And in which the public will discover the absence of safeguards or of any coherent digital strategy should a more radical policy be chosen.