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Gambling on technocrats
The likely appointment of Mario Draghi as Italy’s next prime minister has been widely, if nervously, greeted as a necessary step. Draghi, an esteemed economist and central banker, will be the fourth unelected technocrat to fill the post in Italy in the last 30 years. As the Guardian concedes by way of welcoming Draghi’s appointment, a ready embrace of unelected leaders is “not a good look for any self-respecting democracy.”
Italy’s resort to temporary “technical governments” reflects the fact that its fractious political system, with its multitude of parties and short-lived coalitions, is vulnerable to paralysis at moments of crisis. Such has been the price for a constitution designed to prevent the rise of another Mussolini. Ironically though, the convention of installing technocrats recalls the constitutional role of Dictator in the ancient Roman Republic: a trusted leader who, by consensus among the political class, takes charge for a limited term during emergencies.
During the 1990s, it was the crisis of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the vast Mani pulite corruption scandal, and Silvio Berlusconi’s first chaotic administration which formed the backdrop for the technocratic governments of Carlo Ciampi and Lamberto Dini. Now in the midst of a pandemic and a gathering economic storm, the immediate pretext comes from the collapse of a government led by Giuseppe Conte of the Five Star Movement, amid machinations by Conte’s rivals and accusations of EU emergency funds being deployed for political patronage.
Yet despite its distinctively Italian flavour, this tradition of the technocratic dictator has a much wider European resonance. It reflects the economic and political strains of European integration. And ultimately, the Italian case merely offers a pronounced example of the precarious interplay between depoliticised technocratic governance and democracy which haunts the European Union at large.
The agendas of the Ciampi and Dini cabinets included politically sensitive reforms to state benefits and the public sector, with the purpose of rendering Italy fit for a European economy where Germany set the tune. This pattern was repeated much more emphatically when the next technocratic prime minister, the economist Mario Monti, served from 2011–13. Monti’s mission on behalf of Berlin and Brussels was to…
