Europe: the rise of the technocracy

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• Editorial
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 November 2011 20.30 GMT
• Article history

Coming just a few days after the fall of Athens, the fall of Rome would have given Europe's classically conscious old elite pause for thought. Those still standing in continental politics today, however, are less historically minded – more interested in present balance sheets than the ancient past. So the dispatch of elected if flawed prime ministers inGreece and Italy, and their replacement by supposed economic experts, is viewed not as a problem but as an affirmation that these nations mean business. In the Italian case in particular, this weekend's departure of the undoubtedly dreadful Silvio Berlusconi has for the moment soothed political nerves frayed during last week's bond market rout. But the installation of a new cadre of leaders such as Lucas Papademos in Athens and Mario Monti in Rome – men being ubiquitously branded as "technocrats" – will soon raise more questions than it has answered.

Letting technocrats run Europe is bad politics and bad economics

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• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 November 2011 21.00 GMT
  • Article history

Consider for a moment the injured feelings of the plutocrat. He's the target of round-the-clock protests stretching from Oakland to Norwich. He's denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Goodness, even those carefully-placed "news" stories about how George Osborne must scrap his tax on the super-rich, which once commanded at least a respectful audience, now meet with the puzzled mirth of a country that suspects a wind-up. At this point the penny loafer drops: they're called the 1% because they're lonely.

But through every cold weather front a little sunshine must peep. Which is why the gym-buffed corporate financiers, the chauffeured captains of industry and all the others whose membership subs are simply too big to qualify for the 99% club must have managed a brave little smile at the past week's changes of regime in Italy and Greece. Because that swap of Silvio with Mario, Papandreou with Papademos, shows that however much fashionable opprobrium is now being dumped on the results of free-market fundamentalism, the arguments used to justify it remain powerful.