The era of the well-groomed snake oil salesmen is over

The image-based leadership embodied by Obama and Macron has run its course: their heirs fail to convince and the system no longer attracts the best. What comes next will be judged by what it builds, not by how well it tells the story.

There is a thesis circulating on social media that these days keeps coming up in dinner-table conversations: the peak of globalism had two faces, that of **Barack Obama** and that of **Emmanuel Macron**. Two continents, the same casting call. Young, polished, brilliant orators, with impeccable résumés and total ease in front of a camera. Capable of electrifying a rally in Ohio and charming a room of CEOs in Davos in the same week. As actors they are excellent, and it is worth saying without irony: public charisma is a real talent, and they had it at a rare level.

## The Nobel Peace Prize that rewarded an image

Obama won the **Nobel Peace Prize** in October 2009, **nine months** after taking office. They were not rewarding a track record; they were rewarding an image: that of a post-national world run by institutions and experts. That was the reading at the time, and it still is now. The prize came before there was anything to reward, and that says a lot about how the system worked.

Macron is the European version of the same product. A movement founded a year before the elections, with no grassroots popular base, pushed by the economic, media and administrative elites. "Neither left nor right." Translation: tied to no people and no history. Just the efficient management of globalization.

All their software fit in a single sentence: the global market, supranational institutions and the experts know better than nations what is good for them. Unlimited free trade. Deindustrialization sold as modernization. Borders treated as an anachronism. Sovereignty treated as populism. They were not the architects of this project. They were its faces. The best salespeople it ever had. When you need millions of people to accept that their factory is moving to the other side of the world and that it is for their own good, you do not send a grey technocrat. You send someone who knows how to talk.

## The magic fades and the bench looks thin

That is why Obama's rally footage sounds so hollow today. Same tone, same inflections, same staging. But the audience has changed. They have seen the movie and know how it ends. And the project they carried is dying everywhere: the United States has returned to tariffs and reindustrialization, Europe is finally talking about energy, military and technological sovereignty, borders are a legitimate topic again and supply chains are coming home. The pandemic proved that a country that cannot produce its own face masks is not modern: it is vulnerable.

Macron is at a **15% approval rating**, his lowest since **2017**, and Obama is back on the rally circuit with the magic gone. The most revealing part is what came after. The system can no longer produce an Obama or a Macron. No one that charismatic, that polished, that smooth. There are two reasons. The first is arrogance: for fifteen years they won without truly fighting, with the media on their side and the opponent demonized in advance. When you win too easily you get lazy, you stop caring about casting, and it shows. The second is deeper: truly brilliant people no longer want to enter this system. Fifteen years ago an ambitious young prodigy aimed for Harvard, the senior civil service, the big international institutions. Today he founds a company, builds things, goes where the action is. Nobody signs up for a sinking ship.

## Biden, Harris, Attal, Glucksmann: heirs and imitators

Look at the bench. In the United States they put forward **Joe Biden**, a president whose cognitive decline was obvious to everyone except his inner circle, who spent months hiding it. Then they swapped him in a panic for **Kamala Harris**, who could not answer a simple question without veering into a word salad. After Obama, that is a vertiginous fall.

In France, the same movie. **Gabriel Attal** is Macron on a photocopier: same codes, same lines, no depth. He announced his presidential candidacy from a village square in rural France to make people forget he is a pure product of the richest neighborhoods of Paris. Everyone sees the set and no one buys it. And on the left, the new great hope is **Raphaël Glucksmann**: son of a famous philosopher, a member of the European Parliament in Brussels, the darling of Parisian salons. He talks about the nation and the working class with the polish of a dinner party in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The words are the right ones; the voice is not.

They all sound off-key, like out-of-tune instruments. You can still recognize the score, but nobody wants to hear the concert. That is the first sign of a dying system: it no longer attracts the best. All it has left are heirs and imitators. Charisma is not enough when reality contradicts the story. What comes next will not necessarily be better, but it will be different: leaders judged by what they build, not by how well they tell it. The era of the well-groomed smoke sellers is over; make way for the builders. This thesis should be taken for what it is, a political and economic interpretation, not a firm forecast.