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Charismatic politicians could learn a lesson from technocrats like Italy’s Mario Draghi

Natale Labia
By Natale Labia
25 Oct 2022
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Many contend we are living in an age of history being shaped by leaders. Financial Times commentator Gideon Rachman even recently penned a bestseller titled The Age of the Strongman, which outlines the DNA of the modern autocrat and argues that it is these miscreants who are defining our epoch.

From Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Xi Jinping, to Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsanaro, implicit in all is that there is some mysterious elixir which sociologist Max Weber called “charismatic authority” – an authority that can come simply from the qualities of who someone essentially is.

I have never been convinced by this so-called Great Man Theory of history, as espoused by grumpy Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. 

As compelling as these ideas might be, there is one problem; they are wrong. 

Leo Tolstoy offered perhaps the most famous rebuff in War and Peace when he dismissed such supposedly great figures as Napoleon as “the slaves of history”. 

One does not have to be a Marxist to appreciate that there are more complex issues going on here. Historical change, surely, is more about social and economic change than the whim of one or another person? 

Could Trump have existed without globalisation hollowing out the Rust Belt and manufacturing heartland of America? Could Putin have seized and centralised control had Russia’s transition to liberal democracy been slightly less than catastrophically anarchic? 

Would Xi Jinping have been able to command his goons to unceremoniously remove former party boss Hu Jintao from the Communist Party’s conference last week, in front of the world’s cameras, had China not spent 40 years attempting to do the seemingly impossible – create a free market economy in an autocratically oppressive state?



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Remarking in 375BC that “government is like a ship adrift, its crew fighting over which incompetent should grab hold of the tiller”, Plato was famously wary of power-crazed politicians and preferred technocrats. 

He would therefore surely have noted with some solemnity the world’s most famous technocrat, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, leaving the stage last weekend. 

In February 2021, Italy was in a parlous state. Having been the first and arguably hardest hit country in the West by the Covid pandemic, the government had subsequently botched the vaccine roll-out. After about 20 years of economic stagnation, the economy was in freefall. Per capita GDP had been flat since 2000, making it the worst performing G7 and major European economy. Youth unemployment and poverty had reached generational highs.

Yet within weeks of Draghi being appointed Prime Minister, the vaccination campaign had been resuscitated, eventually becoming one of the most successful in Europe according to the WHO. 

Within months, a decade-long €270-billion recovery plan of investment and reform, funded by the EU, had been agreed – crucially putting implementation at government, not executive, level. 

By the second quarter of 2022, the economy was the fastest growing in the OECD, outpacing China, the US, Germany and the UK. 

Carlyle might have argued that Draghi was also responsible for Italy winning the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, the Euro 2020 football championship, and for its athletes achieving unprecedented success at the Tokyo Olympics, but maybe that would be too much. 

He was, however, clearly a large part of the Economist awarding Italy “Country of the Year” for 2021.

As a technocrat, Draghi was always going to be a temporary fix. 

It remains to be seen how his neo-populist far-right successor Giorgia Meloni fares. Yet he left a great impact because he had no designs on greatness, like those in Rachman’s book. Simply, for the greater good, he wanted to get things done. 

Ever the anti-politician, he mixes an economics PhD’s grasp of complexity with the ability to distil the essence of a problem in a few words, with a disarming charm. 

Those faculties were evident at his last European Council last week, on the thorny and deeply intricate issue of capping gas prices.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had gone into the meeting “opposed on principle”. And yet, according to reports from those present, after a brief speech from Draghi, consensus was reached. The EU would cap gas prices. 

There is a reason such figures as Draghi are known as “public servants”. 

Despite what the current crop of charisma-seeking autocrats might vainly believe, history is not shaped by “Great Men”. 

All politicians, particularly those in South Africa, should learn something from the quietly great technocrats of this world. BM/DM

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