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When France elected a new president, Emmanuel Macron received the most attention for what he was not. He was not the far-right nativist candidate he defeated. Now that he is president, there's more room to ask who Macron is, or more important, how he wants to change France. He ran on a pro-business platform in a country that's often criticized for hardly seeming pro-business at all. Here's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: A renovated 1920s train station in the middle of Paris is now a modern hub for startups. Rachel Vanier, communications director of Station F, gives me a tour of the cavernous 110,000-square-foot space that houses a thousand startups.
RACHEL VANIER: Basically, we call ourselves a startup campus because we actually have 28 different incubators but also a ton of services. In a few months, we're going to have a housing extension. So entrepreneurs from everywhere in the world will be able to come, attend a startup program, live, eat, meet other entrepreneurs.
BEARDSLEY: Station F is funded by a French telecom millionaire. Microsoft and Facebook are just a few of the multinationals sponsoring incubators here. Briton Tom Pullen is one of Station F's 3,000 entrepreneurs. He says Paris is booming these days.
TOM PULLEN: I think within Europe at the moment, it's the place to be. Look at the amount of investment that's been raised over the last year, which has hit record levels. Look at the level of confidence for startups in France at the moment. I think what you see is a real wave of positivity, of optimism.
BEARDSLEY: Pullen says even a few years ago, he would have never imagined London in such difficulty with Paris enjoying a business renaissance.
CHRISTIAN NOYER: Ah, (unintelligible).
BEARDSLEY: Christian Noyer was once head of the Banque de France and vice president of the European Central Bank. Since the Brexit vote, Noyer's been in charge of luring multinationals planning to leave London to Paris. The competition includes cities like Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg. Noyer says Paris was a hard sell at first.
NOYER: At the beginning, they were afraid to come to Paris or they were saying, well, we'll increase a little bit, but we don't want to take the risk to make the hub there. Now it's changing.
BEARDSLEY: Noyer credits the election of Macron. The French president is quickly following through on his promise to transform France. He's overhauled the country's notoriously rigid labor code, making it easier to hire and fire. And his government is preparing a raft of pro-business laws. Noyer says France has the highest labor flexibility in continental Europe, and Paris is now an obvious destination.
NOYER: It's the only big, comprehensive city where you find all sorts of activities. It's the only place, apart from London, where you have the whole financial ecosystem - the banks, the insurance, the asset management, the fintech. There is no other place where you find that.
BEARDSLEY: Back at Station F, entrepreneur Karen Ko says she's raised a million euros in France for her startup. But she says being here is about more than business.
KAREN KO: I actually spent 13 years of my life working in New York City before deciding I needed a change in lifestyle and came to France - and no regret whatsoever in doing that. (Laughter) From a quality-of-life standpoint, it is huge.
BEARDSLEY: The appeal of Paris might best be summed up in a recent tweet by Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. After a recent visit, he tweeted, struck by the positive energy, and the food's good, too. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio, as in a previous Web version, we say the Station F space covers 110,000 square feet. In fact, it's 366,000 square feet. ]