Politics & Power Quote by Lucas Papademos

Technocratic certainty is doing a lot of political work here. Papademos’s sentence is built like a balance sheet: steady verbs ("continue", "secure", "improve"), tidy nouns ("process", "consolidation", "reform"), and outcomes that sound axiomatic ("sound public finances"). The intent is to frame austerity and liberalization not as contested choices but as necessary maintenance. When policy is presented as upkeep, dissent can be recast as irresponsibility.

The subtext is reassurance aimed outward as much as inward. "International competitiveness" signals the real audience: creditors, markets, EU partners, ratings agencies. It’s a pledge that Greece (Papademos’s central stage in the early 2010s) will behave like a disciplined member of the eurozone club, even if that discipline translates domestically into wage pressure, privatizations, and reduced public spending. "Determined" is the tell; it preemptively answers the suspicion that a democratic government might flinch when social costs rise.

Context matters because Papademos is not a retail politician selling a vision. He’s an economist-statesman, briefly prime minister during crisis, speaking the language of institutional trust. The sentence performs competence: long, procedural, impersonal. Nobody is named as benefiting; the public is treated as a set of indicators. That’s why it works rhetorically and why it rankles. It offers a moral narrative without moral vocabulary: prudence over indulgence, reform over stagnation. In a moment when sovereignty felt conditional, the line doubles as a quiet admission that governing has become, in part, meeting external benchmarks.