It might surprise readers of The Wizard of the Kremlin to learn that its author, Giuliano da Empoli, is a “convinced European” and latterly even a “sort of a European federalist, which I wasn’t before”. His prizewinning, bestselling debut novel, first published in French in 2022, tells the story of Vadim Baranov, a fictional theatre and TV producer who masterminds the ascent of Vladimir Putin, and whose forensic scorn for the hypocrisy, solipsism and complacency of western politicians—especially the Blair, Schröder and Clinton generation who prescribed free markets and liberal democracy for all—is wholly convincing.
Modern progressives, including Moscow’s liberal opposition, fare no better. Of “the university professors, the technocrats… the flagbearers of political correctness”, Baranov declares: “Every time they opened their mouths they added to our popularity... When that girl band [Pussy Riot] desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, yelling obscenities at Putin and the Russian patriarch, we got a five-point boost in the polls.”
“Obviously, I’m a realist,” Da Empoli tells me in the café of a Piccadilly bookshop, having arrived from Madrid to promote his new work, The Hour of the Predator. “When you’re facing your adversary, if your stance is just, ‘Well, he’s very bad. He’s nuts,’ okay, you satisfy yourself and people on your side—but it’s not very useful to deal with the thing itself. The more useful way is to try to get into their logic.”
The problem with Europe is that, after an era in which politics was little more than a “competition between technocrats armed with PowerPoint slides”, we “don’t understand what power is anymore”. Power is Da Empoli’s subject—where it resides, and the nature of those who seek it. As a sometime political adviser and academic, and as a writer, the Italian-Swiss has spent much of his working life near to power, including working with former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and French president Emmanuel Macron’s delegation to the UN General Assembly. His new book is a warning about the precariousness of western democracy and a snapshot of this moment of extraordinary change and uncertainty—hence why it’s “the hour” and not “the age or the era of the predator”, he explains.
A mix of firsthand accounts and sketches from history, it charts how an old form of power, the predator leader, has aligned with a new kind—that of the tech barons, whom Da Empoli likens to warlords carving up the digital equivalent of a failed state. Together these are the “Borgians”, named after Machiavelli’s prince, the Duke of Borgia—modern incarnations of “the beast of real power, half fox and half lion, cunning enough to flatter men and forceful enough to subjugate them”. Think El Salvador’s self-styled “coolest dictator in the world”, Nayib Bukele, or the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), whom Da Empoli christens “Borgia 2.0”. We see MBS, here, at a corporate meeting in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton—a sweetly smiling “friendly giant” working the room—punctuated with an account of how, in 2017, he turned the same hotel into the world’s best-appointed prison and torture chamber, where his interrogators extracted the threat and power from his many Saudi rivals as a dentist extracts a tooth.
If, as per Machiavelli, “The first law of strategy is action”, the second for Borgians is transgression. The Borgian political leader, Da Empoli says, uses “miracle”; that is, he makes a show of upending norms “to produce an incredible effect on reality”, promising that “I will break the rules, often… But those [rules] are just protecting the elites and the status quo. So it’s not so bad if I break them.” (Pointing out they are breaking the rules is, therefore, a weak and ineffective political response.) For Bukele the “miracle” is mass imprisonment of gangsters or, rather, anyone whom he thinks looks like a gangster; for Donald Trump it is ICE raids, or trade tariffs unveiled as a gaudy, score-settling gameshow.
The Borgian political leader, Da Empoli says, uses ‘miracle’—that is, he makes a show of upending norms
Such leaders, Da Empoli continues, are “making us think that we Europeans have a model and a system that’s passé” compared to the autocrat’s “velocity”—their licence to act quickly and capriciously. “But the reality is that we have a more advanced model. The reality, as [German philosopher] Peter Sloterdijk says, is the European Union is a confederation of failed empires. We’ve tried the autocratic, imperial model and it wasn’t very good.”
The Hour of the Predator was itself a product of velocity. “I was at work on a novel, but reality kept intruding,” he tells me. It makes its argument through a series of startling vignettes, held together by a keen sense for irony, juxtaposition and the telling detail. Consider Joe Biden holding court at the Barclay hotel in New York—in “a large room with columns and mouldings, wallpaper and deep pile carpet: everything Americans love”—which becomes instead a kind of wake for the old Atlanticist’s worldview. “It’s a strange thing to witness. Such a vibrant scene, with a tired old grandfather at its heart, droning endlessly.”
Or take a meeting in Lisbon of a “cross-section of [Henry] Kissinger’s legendary address book”—senior figures from Nato and the European parliament, “two or three heads of government”—gathered to hear OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind describe an AI-driven future. An “increasingly discomfited” audience slumps in their seats as they begin to comprehend how human society, including the gilded section they inhabit, faces near-obsolescence in a new world where “everything that has, until now, constituted the essence of the human adventure—the autonomy of the individual, for starters—has ceased to mean anything at all”. Hassabis and Altman—“eyes wide open, giving him the permanently startled look of a woodland creature”— tell them that AI will never be able to explain how it makes its decisions. Far from being a “technocrat’s dream”—a utilitarian calculus of pathological efficiency—it is neither transparent nor democratic, demanding absolute faith in its superior reasoning power. Some of “the world’s most powerful mortals” are reduced to a room full of dodos, contemplating a blunderbuss.
The threat of extinction is real. Da Empoli likens himself to an Aztec scribe recording the coming of the conquistadors—a moment when an old order hastens its destruction by inviting in a superior power it does not understand. His Aztec emperors are “the old political class, right and left”. He has witnessed, he tells me, so many “terrible meetings” between conventional politicians and tech barons. “You have the tech guy come in. He’s already bored because, you know, who wants to meet an old tribal leader? The politician doesn’t really understand what’s going on and vaguely asks to be involved. ‘Maybe you can set up a research centre, maybe at least at a data centre?’.”
Nor do they understand how much the Peter Thiels and Mark Zuckerbergs want rid of the old elites and the “old inefficient procedures of checks and balances”. Much better to have a Trump or an MBS, with whom deals can always be made and who also don’t want rules. AI, Da Empoli writes, has long since “escaped all regulatory control and is in the hands of private companies that have elevated themselves to the rank of nation states”. The power the tech barons are acquiring—in our personal lives, our work, our critical infrastructure—is, he says, “pure sovereignty, in the sense that our societies and us as individuals are moving under the sovereignty of the tech platforms and the people who control them”.
Da Empoli believes that working in Italian politics—he was a deputy mayor (for culture) in Florence, as well as an adviser to Renzi, and remains the CEO of a Milan-based thinktank—gave him a headstart in understanding our times. Italy has been the “Silicon Valley of populism” since its party system collapsed in the early 1990s, the site of “one experiment after another”—from Silvio Berlusconi through to Giorgia Meloni. “She’s far-right, I mean that’s her line,” he says of Meloni. “But economically [she] does nothing, is very careful” and has also “reassured Europe about Ukraine”. He believes a Meloni-like offering would probably win power in France, “and maybe in other European countries too”.
Italy also birthed the populist Five Star direct democracy movement which, in Beppe Grillo, had a comedian for a figurehead long before Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky. Comedy, in Da Empoli’s telling, is not the worst training for a life in politics. He writes of his admiration for the satirist Armando Iannucci, who in shows such as Veep and The Thick of It “showed political life as it actually is, a perpetual comedy of errors in which the characters, always unsuited to the positions they occupy, do their best to muddle along”.
Comedy, in Da Empoli’s telling, is not the worst training for a life in politics
Da Empoli himself has an aptitude for comedy. His account of an Obama foundation dinner in 2017—where speakers include the man who pioneered “the mindful consumption of chocolate in the workplace” and a former White House chef on Michelle Obama’s “symbolically powerful” vegetable patch—will resonate with anyone who has been on a terrible corporate awayday. He writes that, had he been American, his party’s jovial security guard, Captain Rocca—“one of the few working-class people at the event”—would have left the dinner “a fully fledged Trump supporter”.
Error, accident, comic self-absorption… if our own follies are somewhere encoded into the DNA of even the mightiest software, then perhaps its ascendancy over us is not a given? “It’s never the inevitable that happens,” agrees Da Empoli. “It’s always something unpredictable that usually stems from mistakes, misconceptions.”
Human life is also not like fiction, which “needs to be believable otherwise you lose your reader. Reality can be as absurd as it wants, so it’s much more powerful.” His next novel will, nonetheless, “stick to reality” for its subject matter. Not a sequel to The Wizard of the Kremlin but “still dealing with topics of contemporary power and its different forms”. Joseph Conrad is one of his chief inspirations, both as a geopolitical writer “with this tragic sense of men confronting their fate and being tested” and as the head of a “fantastic line” of espionage-adjacent Anglo authors such as Graham Greene, John le Carré and Somerset Maugham, as well as more “salon-oriented” French writers such as Paul Claudel, Romain Gary (both diplomats) and Joseph Kessel.
“What about JG Ballard?” I ask. The future hinted at in The Hour of the Predator is Ballardian: in exchange for our data, quiescence and dependence, the tech barons promise the materially wealthy a frictionless existence where doing and thinking, and perhaps also feeling, can be subcontracted to machines and other menial workers. It is the life also being sold by the influencers, celebrities and journalists shilling for the United Arab Emirates and other petrostates: of gated communities served by endless delivery drivers; air-conditioned malls full of trinkets and light shows and extra-sweet treats; of endless pool days and beach days; of, to quote from Ballard’s Cocaine Nights, a novel about existentially bored early retirees on the Costa del Sol, “a billion balconies facing the sun”.
“It is funny you detected that. Ballard is very important for my next book,” Da Empoli says. And from Cocaine Nights he paraphrases another line, one which might serve as another warning among the many Giuliano da Empoli has given us about the future into which we are sleepwalking: “They had decided their life was a long, sunny afternoon, and they had decided to spend it napping.”
