I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/