How Permanent Power Is Born

Power does not always emerge from the places where we formally expect to find it. It does not necessarily coincide with a government, a minister, a parliament, or an election. Sometimes the most resilient forms of power emerge elsewhere: in the empty spaces, the hidden compartments of the system, the gray areas created by absence, inertia, complexity, and the inability of others to fully exercise their responsibilities.

This may be one of the most revealing ways to understand how permanent power takes shape.

Politics changes. Governments fall. Ministers are replaced. Parliamentary majorities shift. Local leaders are elected and eventually replaced. Yet part of the state continues to function, day after day, through bureaucracies, officials, experts, consultants, agencies, public companies, regulatory bodies, procedures, and networks of relationships.

That continuity is necessary. A modern state could not survive if every political change meant replacing the entire administrative machinery. The problem begins when administrative continuity turns into a permanent advantage of the machinery over politics.

Because those who remain acquire something those who arrive do not possess: memory.

They know the precedents, the procedures, the people, the files, the real timelines, the obstacles, the possible interpretations, and the practical ways of getting things done. They know which decisions can actually be implemented and which are likely to remain on paper. A politician may possess the formal authority to decide, but those who understand the machinery from the inside may possess part of the practical power required to turn that decision into reality.

This is where the process begins.

Not necessarily with a conspiracy. Not necessarily with a hidden command center. Not necessarily with someone deliberately setting out to build a "deep state."

Sometimes, all it takes is a vacuum.

Every complex system constantly produces empty spaces. There is a gap between political decisions and their implementation; between legislation and interpretation; between administration and oversight; between the center and the periphery; between the public and private sectors; between those who formally hold responsibility and those who possess the expertise needed to exercise it.

And every vacuum represents an opportunity for power.

Politics says what it wants to achieve. The administration must determine how to achieve it. The law establishes principles and rules, but someone must interpret and apply them. A public contract may be awarded, but someone must oversee its execution. A reform may be passed, but someone must turn it into concrete procedures. An emergency may require rapid decisions, concentrating expertise and authority in extraordinary structures.

At every stage, there is a space.

And that space can be occupied.

The crucial point is that whoever occupies an empty space does not necessarily have to seize power by force. They can simply become indispensable.

That is a far more sophisticated form of power.

If everyone depends on you to understand a problem, find a solution, interpret a regulation, retrieve a file, identify a precedent, or navigate an extraordinarily complex bureaucracy, your influence grows even if nobody has formally granted you political authority.

The power of expertise can therefore become the power of necessity.

And necessity creates dependency.

This mechanism is particularly visible in highly technical fields. Public finance, procurement, energy, healthcare, infrastructure, defense, financial regulation, and digital transformation require knowledge that cannot simply be improvised. The more complex the system becomes, the greater the advantage enjoyed by those who possess specialized knowledge—and especially by those who have accumulated it over many years.

Accumulated knowledge becomes a form of capital.

But there is an even more powerful form of capital: information.

Those who possess information others do not have have an advantage. Those who know where to find that information have an additional advantage. Those who also understand the history of decisions, the relationships between people, and the consequences of previous choices can become a kind of living memory of the organization.

And memory matters enormously in the exercise of power.

A minister may arrive today and be gone tomorrow. A senior official may have been there for years. A consultant may work across several administrations. An expert may advise governments belonging to completely different political camps. A professional may move from the public sector to the private sector and back again.

Power therefore begins to lose its purely institutional character and becomes networked.

It no longer belongs to a single person.

It belongs to relationships.

One official knows another. An official knows a consultant. The consultant knows a company. The company knows a public administrator. The administrator knows a parliamentarian. The parliamentarian knows a minister. The minister changes, but some of the relationships remain.

And this is where permanent power can emerge.

The network does not necessarily have to be clandestine. It does not necessarily have to be illegal. It can arise simply from repeated interaction, trust, mutual advantage, expertise, and continuity.

But once a network becomes sufficiently stable, it can begin to produce something resembling an autonomous apparatus.

Political power changes, while the network survives.

That is the decisive point.

Permanent power does not necessarily need to prevent political change. It can simply learn how to survive it.

It can adapt to different governments, different majorities, different ideologies.

It does not necessarily have to win elections.

It only has to still be there after the elections.

Indeed, in some cases the most effective form of power is precisely the kind that does not need to expose itself. The power that appears when needed, influences a decision, slows a process, suggests a solution, makes one option possible and another impractical.

This is the power of intermediation.

And the intermediary becomes powerful precisely because they stand between two actors who need one another but do not possess the same information.

The same principle can operate in public procurement, state-owned companies, consulting arrangements, appointments, regulatory bodies, technical agencies, and extraordinary structures created to deal with emergencies.

Emergencies, in particular, can become natural laboratories for the concentration of power. When ordinary procedures are deemed too slow, extraordinary instruments are introduced: commissioners, special task forces, accelerated procedures, and exceptional decision-making structures. In many cases, this is indispensable. But every exception simultaneously creates a new space for discretion.

The real danger, therefore, is not necessarily the emergency itself.

It is the transformation of the exception into a permanent condition.

The same applies to the digital transformation of the state. In the future, an increasing share of power will not lie solely with whoever signs an official decision, but with those who control the infrastructures through which that decision can actually be implemented. Databases, information systems, interoperability, algorithms, and artificial intelligence may become new sites of power concentration.

This will be a less visible form of power than traditional bureaucracy.

It may not necessarily decide what the state should do.

But it may help determine what the state is actually capable of doing.

And that could be even more important.

At this point, a perhaps counterintuitive conclusion emerges: the deep state, understood as the permanent power of entrenched structures, does not necessarily have to be imagined as a secret organization.

It could be an emergent phenomenon.

It could arise spontaneously from the accumulation of thousands of small vacancies filled over the course of many years.

A vacuum creates an intermediary. The intermediary becomes necessary. Necessity produces dependency. Dependency creates relationships. Relationships produce a network. The network accumulates memory. Memory produces continuity. Continuity produces autonomy.

And autonomy eventually produces power.

The sequence could be expressed simply:

vacuum → occupation → necessity → dependency → relationships → network → continuity → autonomy → power.

At that point, nobody necessarily needs to be in charge from above.

The system can begin to preserve itself.

Perhaps this is the most sophisticated form of power: not the power that orders others what to do, but the power that becomes indispensable for others to do anything at all.

That is why, if we want to understand where permanent power actually comes from, we should not limit ourselves to observing who formally occupies the institutions.

We should examine the spaces the institutions leave unattended.

Who fills them?

For how long?

With what expertise?

With what relationships?

With what information?

And above all: what would happen if that person, structure, or network suddenly disappeared?

If the answer is that a significant part of the system would no longer know how to function, then we may have identified something important.

We have found a center of power.

Not necessarily illegal. Not necessarily hidden. Not necessarily corrupt.

But potentially permanent.

Because the hardest power to remove is not the power that is imposed.

It is the power that, after filling a vacuum, manages to convince everyone that it is indispensable.

Italy Does Not Need a Coach

Let us be clear: Italy does not need a coach. Not because the country is perfect as it is — far from it — but because, within the geopolitical framework of the Western world, Italy has such limited influence that its political class can afford to survive without being truly held accountable for results.

The perception is that, especially since the end of the Second World War, Italy's room for strategic autonomy has often been constrained by international, economic, and geopolitical factors. From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand why politics can turn into a self-referential system, capable of reproducing itself regardless of its actual effectiveness. When the most important decisions appear to be heavily influenced by external forces, political competition risks becoming a matter of managing the status quo rather than shaping the future.

At this point, it is impossible not to refer to Gaetano Mosca, the Sicilian political theorist who was one of the founders of modern political science. More than a century ago, Mosca developed the theory of the political class, arguing that every society — regardless of whether it calls itself a monarchy, a republic, or a democracy — is ultimately governed by an organized minority over a largely unorganized majority.

According to Mosca, the essential difference between political systems is not simply found in their formal institutions, but in the ability of ruling minorities to organize themselves, occupy positions of power, and preserve their influence over time. Political elites are inevitable; the real question is their quality, their openness to renewal, and their ability to serve society rather than themselves.

Mosca also introduced the concept of the "political formula": the set of ideas, values, and principles through which a ruling class justifies its authority and presents its power as legitimate. Ideologies may change, political language may evolve, and slogans may be replaced, but the underlying mechanism often remains the same: a governing elite creates a narrative capable of maintaining consensus.

Seen through Mosca's perspective, contemporary Italy offers a striking example. The Right speaks of national sovereignty and tradition. The Left speaks of progress, equality, and rights. The Centre presents itself as the voice of moderation and responsibility. Each side has its own political formula, yet they often appear unable to challenge the deeper structures that allow the system to reproduce itself.

Meanwhile, citizens continue to finance an increasingly expensive political machine. After the abolition of direct public funding for political parties, the relationship between politics and interest groups has remained at the centre of public debate. Parliament is often perceived as a place where party discipline prevails over individual responsibility, with representatives following the instructions of party leadership rather than engaging in genuine independent evaluation of every legislative proposal.

Years ago, Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella exposed the phenomenon known as the "casta", highlighting the privileges and self-referential nature of political elites. Later, the events surrounding Luca Palamara contributed to a broader debate about the internal dynamics of the judiciary and the influence of professional networks within it. For many citizens, politics and the judiciary have come to symbolize two powerful institutions that, despite their different roles, may share a tendency toward self-preservation.

From this point of view, Italy's problem is not the absence of a ruling class. Mosca would argue that every society inevitably produces one. The real problem is the quality of its renewal. When an organized minority stops allowing new talent, competence, and fresh ideas to enter, it risks becoming a closed oligarchy, more interested in managing its own survival than in leading the country.

This is perhaps the deepest crisis of Italian politics: not simply a crisis of ideology, but a crisis of circulation among elites.

Neither of the major political camps seems capable of offering a genuine path of renewal. A part of the Right continues to speak as if Italy were still a major international power, while the country's actual weight in the global system is much more limited. On the other side, a part of the Left remains attached to cultural categories inherited from the Cold War, even though many of its economic policies have gradually aligned with the dominant neoliberal framework. It is a significant contradiction: a twentieth-century vocabulary combined with twenty-first-century economic practices.

Then there is the Centre, the transformed heir of the old Christian Democratic tradition, which struggles to define a clear identity and is often perceived more as a permanent mechanism of mediation than as a force capable of proposing a long-term vision.

In such a scenario, talking about a "coach" who can awaken Italy risks becoming an illusion. A coach can help someone who is willing to question themselves. But Italian politics often appears trapped inside a vast echo chamber, where every faction believes its own narrative is sufficient to explain reality.

This is where Gaetano Mosca becomes surprisingly relevant again. If his theory is correct, no coach can truly transform a country as long as its political class remains an organized minority speaking mainly to itself, while the majority of citizens remains fragmented, passive, and unable to exert continuous pressure for genuine change.

The problem, therefore, is not finding a coach for Italy.

The real question is whether Italian society still possesses enough awareness, organization, and determination to force its ruling class to renew itself.

Because history shows that nations do not decline only when they lack leaders. They decline when their elites stop being challenged.