After the Franchises: The Technocratic Turn
Two franchise models have now had sufficient time to be evaluated on their results. The right-populist franchise delivered sovereignty theater and institutional corrosion. The left-progressive franchise delivered solidarity theater and policy incoherence. Both failed on the same metric: material conditions for ordinary people did not improve under either model, and in several cases measurably worsened. The electorate is not ideologically sophisticated in the academic sense, but it is ruthlessly empirical in the practical sense. It notices when things do not get better. What comes next, across a growing number of democracies, looks less like a new ideology and more like a deliberate retreat from ideology — a turn toward competence as the primary political proposition.
The technocratic turn is not new as a concept, but its current emergence has a different character from previous iterations. Earlier technocracy — the Brussels model, the IMF conditionality model, the Blairite third-way model — arrived as a supplement to existing ideological politics, a managerial layer applied over a still-functioning democratic consensus. What is emerging now is something more reactive: technocracy as the explicit alternative to two failed franchise systems, chosen by electorates that have run both experiments and want their governments to be boring. The demand is not for a new vision. It is for functional administration.
The clearest current case study is Poland. The Tusk government that displaced PiS in 2023 came to power on an anti-franchise coalition — a deliberately heterogeneous grouping united by the single proposition that the previous franchise had to go, and that what replaced it needed to actually govern. Tusk’s political identity is centrist not out of ideological conviction but out of strategic positioning: centrism is the only register that holds together a coalition spanning liberals, Christian democrats, and moderate socialists who share no common programme except competence and EU alignment. The government’s early actions focused on institutional restoration — judiciary, media, rule-of-law standards — before policy ambition. The sequence was deliberate. You cannot run a functioning government through captured institutions. Fixing the instruments comes before playing them.
Hungary may be entering the same sequence today, if the polling translates into seats and seats translate into a Magyar government. The Tisza party’s proposition has been consciously constructed along technocratic lines: Magyar’s economic team is composed of former executives from Shell and Vodafone, not ideologues. The platform is restoration of EU institutional relationships, prosecution of corruption through the EU’s own legal mechanisms, and a return to the kind of technocratic economic management that Hungary ran before 2010. It is not an inspiring programme in the franchise sense. It does not designate enemies or perform solidarity. It offers to make the state function correctly. In an electorate that has watched sixteen years of state capture produce inflation, stagnation, and a roundabout to nowhere, functional administration is the radical proposition.
The Macron case is instructive as both proof and warning. Macron’s original 2017 electoral proposition was the purest expression of the technocratic turn to date: explicitly post-ideological, explicitly competence-branded, built around the claim that the old left-right axis was obsolete and that France needed management rather than doctrine. It worked electorally, twice, against franchise opponents on both sides. But Macron’s technocracy carried its own failure mode, which is the failure mode the model must solve if it is to be durable: it read as elite capture. A government of graduates managing an economy for graduates, rhetorically committed to modernization, materially delivering a pension reform that the population did not want and could not influence. The gilets jaunes were not a franchise movement. They were an empirical verdict — the same empirical instinct that defeats right and left franchises applied to centrist technocracy. The question the technocratic model must answer is not whether it can govern competently, but whether it can govern visibly, accountably, and with enough democratic texture that the people being managed do not eventually conclude they are being administered rather than represented.
This is the structural challenge. Technocracy’s legitimacy problem is the inverse of the franchise’s legitimacy problem. Franchises are delegitimized by failure to deliver. Technocracy is delegitimized by success that is invisible or unattributable — by competent management that produces no narrative, no story the governed population can inhabit. The franchise offers its supporters an identity; the technocratic government offers them a lower mortgage rate or a shorter hospital wait. The first is felt immediately and continuously. The second is felt only in retrospect, comparatively, against what the alternative might have been. This asymmetry is technocracy’s permanent communications deficit, and it is not incidental. It is structural.
The long-run trajectory nevertheless favors the technocratic turn, for a simple reason: the franchise models burn their operating environments. Right-populist franchises corrode the institutions that make governance possible and the alliances that provide economic stability. Left-progressive franchises exhaust their coalitions with internal loyalty tests and alienate the swing voters who determine electoral outcomes. Both generate entropy. Neither generates the stable, moderately-improving conditions that make populations politically patient. Technocratic governments, when they function, generate exactly those conditions — and patient populations are the only populations that give governments the time to govern.
The realistic scenario is not a permanent technocratic consensus. It is a recurring correction. Electorates will periodically cycle back to franchise politics when technocracy becomes too visibly managerial, too distant, too comfortable in its own competence. The franchise will return, run the playbook, fail on material delivery, and be replaced again. What changes, over time, if the technocratic turns are sufficiently successful, is the baseline. Each restoration of functional governance raises the floor of what the electorate accepts as normal. Each franchise cycle that ends in judicial reckoning raises the perceived cost of the franchise model. The correction mechanism does not eliminate the disease. But it shortens the intervals and raises the price.
That is the most realistic ambition for the centrist technocratic alternative: not to end the cycle, but to make the cycle more expensive for those who run it.