I have always thought and taught that there are no technical governments and now I have also decided to write it. Nor are there any technicians in the government. There are people who have certain knowledge and skills who for a more or less long period of their lives and following various processes of legitimation and nomination, carry out the function of government which is a political function tout court.
In fact, as the iconoclast economist Maffeo Pantaleoni affirmed, there is no economic policy because there is only politics. Every government (national or local) must solve problems of economic, social, industrial, justice, public order in the preventive and repressive dimension, foreign affairs, etc., and every policy produces "political" effects understood as modification of relations between social groups organized in different ways (parties, pressure groups, associations, etc.). If, on the other hand, we mean that some governments are made up of people who have always or for a long time carried out activities in parties and are legitimated to assume those responsibilities and to exercise that power as a function of balance between parties, while those who enter into be part of a government on the basis of the recognition of their specific competences, then the designation of technical governments can be accepted for simplification.
However, it is appropriate to dispel the idea that technicians are by definition neutral or are guided only (or mainly) by the desire to pursue the common interest (or good) and by the principle/criterion of rationality. This is because people have values that inspire them and behaviors that are more or less consistent with internalized and declared values, therefore neutrality and independence of judgment are characteristics of people that society can evaluate by considering history, declarations, concrete choices. Economists who believe in the rationality of markets to which they almost attribute a "salvific" role, without taking into account that it was the integrated markets that determined the systemic crisis that erupted in 2008 with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brother, they propose very different solutions from economists who believe in the primacy of public choices, who on the basis of the theoretical assumptions present in their writings are often considered "statist". They propose solutions there are still several economists who believe in the role of subsidiarity or the solidarity economy understood not as a simple response to the market failures of public choices but as a new model of economic relations.
Government men, whether they are career politicians or technicians in the sense mentioned above, who consider a public order based on prevention as a priority (both of large-scale organized crime that uses institutional circuits to launder dirty money, and of petty crime in the cities, and of that which manifests itself in stadiums or other events), are different from those that give greater emphasis to repression which, at times, is exercised with non-transparent interventions and respectful of citizens' rights and human dignity, as unfortunately has happened and also happens in countries that describe themselves as democratic.
Based on these considerations, it can be concluded that the government of the technicians desired by the President showed strengths, above all with regard to the recovery of credibility vis-à-vis foreign countries and economic skills, but showed significant weaknesses with regard to internal credibility and legitimacy (it is no coincidence that from January to the end of May the level of approval went from over 62-63% to 42-43% of Italians) and the ability to manage communication and change processes. A content analysis would be enough to highlight that until April the word rigor was used too often compared to that of growth (development would be better), while the latter was cited an equivalent number of times to the former only after the French elections, which weakened the Pagrigi-Berlin axis, strengthening the Paris-Rome one.
The reform of the labor market, apart from the contents, has been managed and communicated in ways that they actually have created a generalized dissatisfaction, primarily by trade unions and business representatives. If in the future we wanted to move towards the presence of technical governments or technicians in government, it will be necessary to choose those who have "change management" skills, which implies the consideration of institutional, social, political, as well as economic feasibility, from the simple proposition of optimal or ideal models.
