Politics & Power Quote by Romano Prodi

Equilibrium is Prodi’s polite word for a panic button. Coming from a technocratic statesman who shepherded Italy and the European Commission through the messy post-Cold War reinvention of European governance, the line reads less like abstract political theory than a warning from someone who has watched institutions wobble under stress. “Democracies must have equilibrium” signals a belief that democratic legitimacy is not self-sustaining; it depends on balancing forces that naturally want to dominate one another: parties versus courts, executive speed versus parliamentary scrutiny, national sovereignty versus supranational rules.

The second clause sharpens into a diagnosis of the present: politics has learned to treat information not as a shared civic utility but as terrain to be captured. “Entanglement” is doing heavy lifting here. It covers the obvious (state broadcasters, patronage media, intimidation of journalists) and the contemporary (algorithmic amplification, influencer pipelines, disinformation-as-strategy). Prodi’s intent is preventative: minimize the feedback loop where political power shapes the information environment, which then manufactures consent for more political power.

The subtext is European, even if he doesn’t say so. This is the EU’s quiet obsession: democracies can hold elections and still drift into managed reality, where formal pluralism survives but the public sphere is rigged. Prodi’s formulation is rhetorically restrained, almost bureaucratic, and that restraint is part of its force. It frames media independence not as a moral luxury but as a stability requirement: break the information ecosystem, and equilibrium becomes theater.