Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
The European Union has lost its place in the global race for artificial intelligence. In a single tweet on platform X, France’s President Emmanuel Macron inadvertently outlined the convoluted situation while simultaneously revealing his personal emotional fragility.
The leading representatives of the European Union like to present themselves as emotionless technocrats. Maintaining the greatest possible distance from citizens, they execute their agenda of societal transformation toward what they understand as a net-zero transformation economy.
This ostentatious distance from the citizenry acts as a simulacrum of power, which, in politicians like Emmanuel Macron, often veers into the caricatural.
Macron’s striking presence in foreign affairs—whether regarding the Ukraine war or recurring provocations toward the United States—correlates with his aggressive censorship policy toward his own population. A president without a people, steering his minority government through a budgetary crisis that brings France ever closer to the fiscal abyss.
In Macron’s persona, the European misstep is condensed: economically failed, deeply unpopular among his own people, geopolitically essentially irrelevant—and yet imbued with lofty, messianic plans.
This performative play of power, coupled with hardly disguised impotence and incompetence, inevitably produces an effect that can be described as clownish. It is the expression of a political style that can no longer reconcile claim with reality—and thus delivers less leadership than a tragicomic performance.
A Touch of Emotion
Politicians like the French president are indeed aware of the growing public anger over their policies and, behind the technocratic façade, very much experience emotional states—Macron revealed this for a brief moment on February 7 on the platform “X,” which he otherwise fights.
This moment of exposure was triggered by a reaction to Israeli AI investor Dr. Eli David. The entrepreneur had ridiculed the French government’s plan to initiate an AI revolution with a mere initial investment of €30 million, publicly calling the president a “clown.”
Macron responded in classic social media fashion: fast, unconsidered, emotional. And this was precisely the real revelation. His message not only displayed personal fragility but simultaneously exposed Europe’s fatal economic strategy in the field of artificial intelligence.
Macron directly addressed David’s criticism and slid into a rhetorical trap, writing: Yes, exactly this “clown,” meaning himself, would trigger an investment boom with €30 million, eventually mobilizing over €100 billion in private funds. Macron plans a French Silicon Valley south of Paris and intends to catapult his country to the Olympus of artificial intelligence—with €30 million of state money, initially benefiting those who provide the technological framework for the upcoming rollout of digital IDs.
In this sentence, Europe’s dilemma crystallized: self-assurance and denial, the familiar pathos of EU Europeans combined with an astonishing detachment from reality—and a political style that reveals more about Europe’s position in the global AI race than any sober analysis could.
Those familiar with the codes, memes, and recurring keywords of digital platforms understand the significance of this label. When “clown world” or “clown politics” is mentioned, it refers precisely to the comedy we witness daily: the routine evasion of European top politicians from the consequences of their centrally controlled policies—be it economic and industrial policy, migration, or the grotesquely perceived energy policy.
The clown meme condenses the cynically self-ironic perception of the viewer of this comedy—a viewer aware that they are not only the target of these policies but will ultimately bear their consequences.
Clown politics takes many forms. These include the countless crisis or innovation summits in which politicians stage themselves retroactively as initiators of the new, attempting to position themselves at the forefront of developments they have ignored or actively obstructed for decades.
These summits are a particularly pernicious form of masking incompetence: political self-validation rituals simulating activity while merely covering up structural stagnation.
Another Lost Year
It has been almost exactly one year since Emmanuel Macron, at the AI conference Choose France, presented his megalomaniac-seeming investment initiative. Over €100 billion in private investment pledges were said to have been mobilized, with asset manager Brookfield promising more than €20 billion, and the UAE sovereign wealth fund with €50 billion, to participate in Macron’s Silicon Valley. To this day—nothing has happened.
As elsewhere in the EU, a Kafkaesque thicket of regulation seriously blocks private-sector engagement. At least France could score points thanks to nuclear power: stable, cheap, ideal for energy-hungry data centers. And Germany? Its locational advantage has been squandered in green delusions. Yet France remains trapped in paralyzing stagnation—announcements fade, visions fizzle, and the digital Silicon Valley appears like an illusion from the bureaucratic dream factory.
The contrast with the United States could hardly be starker. There, around $400 billion in private investments in artificial intelligence and data centers were mobilized last year alone. The infrastructure of the data economy of the future is being built in the United States, where President Donald Trump deregulates markets, cuts taxes, and promotes the comeback of nuclear energy.
Notably, major US data center operators—from Meta to Google—have already begun investing in their own energy sources. This not only stabilizes their business models but also the American energy grid. It is an impressive counterpoint from the private sector to Brussels’ statist economic model, where technological ignorance seems almost cultivated.
Europe’s idea of state seed funding and centrally planned market regulation is the real problem.
European society has drifted too far from the principles of market economy, personal responsibility, and a general culture of initiative in business. Bureaucracy, green socialism, and the decades-long cultural struggle against bourgeois values and roots now bear their rotten fruits. The spirit of EU bureaucracy has warped the perception of economic reality for citizens, entrepreneurs, and the political class alike.
New technologies and innovations are no longer understood as opportunities but as reasons to defensively secure the status quo. This psychopolitical consequence of European bureaucratization weighs like lead on the prosperity and productivity of European economies—with consequences that even French presidents in combative cynic mode on “X” cannot hide.
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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
