Jealousy. It is the feeling that withers your heart when you have the misfortune to be a political journalist and you hold in your hands a book by Giuliano Da Empoli. Immediately extended by the shame of experiencing such a sad passion for an author so humble, so courteous. But that’s how. The writer who publishes Predators (Gallimard) has elegance – and luxury – of distance, that political journalism does not have or can no longer have it at an emergency time.
It’s been a long time, it’s always that the former strategist of the president of the Italian council Matteo Renzi became a writer. The Mage du Kremlin (Gallimard, Grand Prix of the novel of the French Academy 2022), his novel-Vrai published in 2022, undoubtedly reinforced it in his certainty that in politics, discernment increases with the depth of field. He never met his main character Vladislav Sourkov, former gray eminence of Vladimir Putin, who became under his pen Vadim Baranov. However, he reaches him. The dissect. Depicts its meticulous observation of the orange revolution of 2004 and the exploitation of this challenge by Russia. This is called feeling the time. Cataclysm, here is an empoli brutally transformed by war, the real one, and by the lazy press sort of Paco Rabanne to the right predictions. He who only aspires to the rigor of the “aztec scribe” does not intend to turn a guess and even less if it is a question of announcing apocalypses.
His gaze at an angle
Is it for this reason that he returned in 2025 with a test? He reassures: he has a novel on fire. But he could not let in the back of a notebook the material accumulated during his expected expeditions to interpret “his favorite role: that of the type which we do not understand very well what he does there”. It would have been regrettable, indeed. Terrible even. Not so much because Giuliano Da Empoli penetrates the playgrounds of the powerful, autocrats and kings of tech, but because he does it with his gaze, the one who offers his readers sketches and portraits halfway between those of the 17th century moralists and the Memory sketch by Jean CAU. The result is as bright as it is vesperal. Quietly murdered. But the writer mowing with an affability … and what about this dragging Italian accent and a hayer that we hear almost when he writes in French? Emmanuel Macron wants it by his side when he goes to the United Nations, Henry Kissinger involves him in front of a sample of “his legendary address book”, Justin Trudeau invites him for his lunch on artificial intelligence and, at twenty years old, he hits the eye of Francesco Cossiga, modest president of the Italian Republic from 1985 to 1992.
But never since he ceased to work with Renzi, he has given in on his obsession: the conservation of his margin of freedom, the one which guarantees him this atypical glance. Da Empoli does not recommend anyone, he deciphers everyone. In Chaos engineers, Published in 2019 (JC Lattès), it was the time for leaders who instrumentalize anger. In The time of predators, Here it has reached the next stage, that where chaos becomes the signature of tyrants. Chief predator, Donald Trump has serious competitors. They work in Russia, Saudi Arabia -Read and then assimilate without trembling the chapter devoted to the stunning operation of the Ritz -Carlton organized by Mohammed Ben Salmane to condemn the traitors and establish fear -, in Salvador … and in this neoroyiaume led by the tech giants “where everything that had constituted the essence of the human adventure, ceased to put on the slightest meaning “.
To resist, what do we have in our power? According to Da Empoli and his pessimistic humor, not much. Thus he narrates the dinner of the Obama Foundation to which he went, a year after the election of Trump in the White House, modified by the hope of finding some encouraging ideas near the one who was “the lighthouse of the Liberal Democrats of the planet”. Between the introductory discourse on the merits of the organic vegetable garden maintained by Michelle Obama and Heather, “the conversation facilitator” installed at his table, we feel that the author hesitates. Plouf, Plouf… What is the worst? Without hesitation, that what remains of democracy and moderation is so overwhelmed. When progressivism changes in the grip.
The time of predators, by Giuliano Da Empoli. Gallimard, 160 p., 19 euros.
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