Macron and Ben Salman’s Amusement Park
On paper, the story of the day was a €6 billion leisure park in Cergy-Pontoise, presented with great fanfare by the President as the biggest deal since Disneyland Paris. In substance, some twenty agreements were signed that day — and curiously, it was the sole manga-and-video-game project that made headlines, while Israel’s recognition conditioned on a Palestinian state, the Iranian and Yemeni threat to the Kingdom, the Turkish-Pakistani-Saudi defence pact, and the near-rupture in Riyadh-Abu Dhabi relations all slipped completely under the radar.
Belhassine doesn’t stop there: he digs up a forgotten ghost, that of Gaith Pharaon — a colourful Saudi financier who, in the 1980s, already owned a 55-hectare plot in… Cergy-Pontoise, where he had built an amusement park, Mirapolis, liquidated two years after its inauguration by Jacques Chirac. A curse that may well repeat itself — unless, as the author suggests between the lines, the real strategic project lies elsewhere: in a certain “Prometheus Plan,” priced at €620 billion.
Hold on tight — the irony here is wielded like a blade.
