Leave, come back. In 2018, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet moved away from political life for “new horizons”. Moving to New York, to the chic Upper East Side neighborhood, neighboring Central Park. “Engineer” for the French multinational Capgemini in the United States. Tuesday June 2, she reappeared on France Inter because she thinks she has “things to say” in the political debate of the next presidential election.
“I’m not a candidate for anything! », assured the former Secretary of State and Sarkozy Minister (2007-2012) in front of the long list of potential candidates. “I will support Édouard Philippe,” she announced. While the central bloc and the right appear divided for the moment, she believes that the president of the Horizons party, who, like her, passed through the RPR, the UMP and Les Républicains, has the capacity “to bring together, to bring together in calm, to bring together in dialogue”.
To justify her wish to be “useful” to the former prime minister’s campaign, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet highlighted her work experience in the United States, an “observation post” of the “very major transformations” that the world is facing: ecological transition, energy transition, digital transformation and artificial intelligence. Questions that she had already followed in her ministerial portfolios of ecology and digital development.
“Need people who stay the course”
After her defeats in the municipal elections in Paris in 2014, and in the legislative elections in 2017, beaten by a Macronist, she left everything to direct, across the Atlantic, the cybersecurity activity of Capgemini, before spending five years within the Antin investment fund. In January 2026, she left this financial sector to join an American research center specializing in the artificial intelligence and media sectors.
According to “NKM”, as in the United States, “French political life has been contaminated by a movement that comes from social networks, the attention economy, the click, you know, the dopamine shocks”. “We are saturating our intellectual space, our energy, all our attention. And that has spilled over into political life: we go from reaction to reaction. And you know what? Reaction is not action,” she explained.
“Faced with this, we need people who do not go from reaction to reaction and who hold their course,” she said, while Édouard Philippe indicated the desire to move forward in his campaign at his own pace, without falling into “hypercommunication”.
“I have not changed my mind” on the RN
Another phenomenon that she observed in the United States: a brutalization of political life. “Brutality is associated with vitality,” underlined Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. On the side of brutality are strength, movement, and then conversely deliberation, dialogue, the search for cooperation, it is weakness. That is absolutely deadly for democracy because democracy is on the side of the latter. »
Fifteen years after the publication of her book Le Front antinational (Éditions du Moment), the former deputy vice-president of the UMP affirmed that she has “not changed her mind”. The National Rally “is not the continuity of the right, it is not the harder right, it has different origins and it would take us elsewhere,” she warned. In the world of “empires” being built by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, she believes that the RN would put France “in the wake of the strongest” and would lead to “the weakening of Europe”.
