Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago lands this line like a verdict, not a theory: politics doesn’t lead the economy, it trails it, carrying the bags. The blunt repetition of “power” is the point. He’s stripping away the civics-class romance of government as neutral referee and recasting it as management, a bureaucracy that serves whoever already owns the leverage. “Functionaries” is the dagger. It’s the word you use for clerks, for people who stamp forms and keep the machine humming. In Saramago’s framing, elected officials don’t govern so much as process decisions made elsewhere.

The subtext is less conspiratorial than structural. He isn’t suggesting a smoke-filled room so much as a default gravity: capital moves faster than legislation, threatens exit, buys access, funds campaigns, sets employment, shapes media narratives. Under those conditions, politics becomes the art of negotiating with the people who can crash the economy by shrugging. Calling governments “functionaries” also mocks the self-mythology of the state: the grand speeches, the flags, the procedural theater. It’s a demystification tactic with moral heat.

Context matters. Saramago grew up under Salazar’s dictatorship and later watched liberal democracy spread across Europe alongside privatization and the EU’s market discipline. His fiction and essays repeatedly circle institutional hypocrisy: the way systems that promise human dignity quietly reward obedience to money. The line works because it names an uncomfortable sensation many people recognize - that the ballot feels real, yet the boundaries of the possible are quietly set by balance sheets.