Cars On July 9, 2026, Volkswagen announced the unthinkable: its lineup cut in half, options slashed by 75 percent, four German plants under threat, and up to 100,000 jobs on the line. Days earlier, news broke that BYD had twice tried to take control of Renault, rebuffed by a French state playing the hero while Geely was already inside the house. The prevailing narrative blames China; it has the wrong culprit. Entrenched codetermination, an EV calendar set by decree, capital locked up by the Florange law: Europe’s auto industry isn’t dying of competition, it’s dying of fifty years of protection that excused it from adapting. Creative destruction deferred doesn’t disappear, it accumulates until the break, and the wolf never had to force the door: we sold it the keys.
Digital euro On June 23, 2026, by forty-three votes to fourteen with one abstention, the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted its position on the digital euro. Its chair, French MEP Aurore Lalucq, hailed a “historic day” for the Union’s monetary sovereignty. The plenary vote will follow in early July, then comes the trilogue, […]
Artificial Intelligence US export controls were meant to strangle Chinese AI; instead they taught it frugality, and frugality became its pricing weapon. DeepSeek, Qwen, and the swarm of open-weight models now deliver good enough at a fraction of the Western price, which is all it takes to tip the overwhelming majority of use cases. But the market hasn’t tipped where people think: the absolute frontier stays American, and the real moat, distribution, already has the hyperscalers reselling the Chinese commodity on their own compute. For Europe, defaulting to the Hangzhou API means swapping one suzerain for another, when the only real exit, self-hosting open weights, is no free lunch. What remains to be seen is whether the continent will build the conditions, regulatory and industrial, that make this reflex something more than the gesture of an enlightened minority.
Cars Ferrari has unveiled its first electric car, the Luce, designed by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom: 1,050 horsepower, 550,000 euros, and the silhouette of an iPhone on wheels with nothing Italian left about it. The reception has been brutal. Montezemolo fears “the destruction of a myth,” Briatore piles on, and the stock has plunged six to eight percent in a matter of hours. Behind the car lies an entire Europe, one capable of regulating its decline but no longer of building its future, ready to sacrifice Scaglietti and Pininfarina on the altar of a transition nobody asked for. Which leaves the real question: does our civilization still have anything to offer, or must we now look to Cupertino for what Maranello once knew how to invent?
Digital sovereignty A data leak every hour in France, 12.2 million people exposed in 2025, 36.8 million France Travail records on the dark web: this isn’t a fate, it’s an architecture choice. A family of cryptographic techniques, zero-knowledge proofs, makes it possible to prove your age, your residence or your income without transmitting a single piece of personal data. It has existed since 1985, it runs in production at Google, Apple and Cloudflare, it’s written into the eIDAS 2.0 regulation. It isn’t arriving in French administrations, and that isn’t a technical problem. When the State draws an advantage from a durably insecure environment to justify France Identité, the programmable digital euro and every new layer of centralization, the deployment of a cryptography that would render all of this useless isn’t an oversight: it’s a choice.
Digital euro On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.
Digital sovereignty The IMF is forecasting -0.2% growth in 2026. The real data (destroyed refineries, terminals out of service, sector-wide shortages) point to a -1.5% scenario for developed economies. Standard models reason in prices, not volumes, and ignore threshold effects: a 10% loss of energy triggers a 15% drop in heavy industry. Between the reassuring forecasts and the crisis ahead, no one is preparing the public, and every day lost is one day less to organize collective resilience.
Europe The European Union now strikes its own citizens with economic sanctions without trial, without a judge, without any criminal law defining the alleged offense. A Swiss colonel and a German journalist have had their accounts frozen for expressing analyses that displease the European Council; forced to apply for humanitarian waivers in order to feed themselves. These measures, labeled “administrative” to bypass the safeguards of criminal law, nonetheless inflict heavier consequences than a court conviction: a ban on working, on traveling, on receiving the slightest assistance. This drift is part of a methodical three-stage escalation: censorship delegated to the platforms via the DSA, the control infrastructure (digital identity, the digital euro), and now existential punishment through asset freezes. By turning political opinion into grounds for civil death, the EU is shifting from soft power to hard power; and trampling the very principles of the rule of law it claims to defend.
Digital sovereignty As France settles into a world record for pessimism, our flagship industrial projects like SCAF and IRIS² are sinking into bureaucracy and European compromise. While China and the United States build the future without asking permission, we prefer to turn the precautionary principle into a state religion. This deadlock isn’t technical; it’s cultural. We’ve sacrificed bold ambition for a regulatory comfort that manufactures nihilism. It’s high time we reclaimed the right to dream big and finally put builders ahead of analysts. Because meaning doesn’t come from caution. It comes from audacity owned without apology.
Digital sovereignty Swisscom, majority-owned by the Swiss Confederation, crossed a bright line by funding the pro-e-ID committee and encouraging one of its executives to promote the project publicly, potentially swaying a vote decided by 0.4 percent. Meanwhile, Digitalswitzerland orchestrates a coalition of banks and public bodies to align Switzerland with eIDAS 2.0, all under the banner of “digital leadership.” Palantir, though not directly involved, keeps extending its big data ecosystem across finance and security, creating a structural dependence on American technology. Switzerland did not choose its digital future: it was chosen for her.