SYRI The rise of technocratic politics in the EU: the legacies of neoliberalism 2025

They have also exposed tensions between EU economic governance and representative democracies, resulting in forms of anti-system politics and technopopulism, in both Western and Eastern European societies.

The data shows that these tensions result from the post-1970s transformations of the EU’s political and economic governance, which aligned with a neoliberal trajectory that was normalised in the 1990s and in the post-Maastricht period. The historical trajectory leading to these conditions is relevant for understanding the common risks to representative democracies in the EU and inspires an analytical framework for examining cases from comparative perspectives in both Eastern and Western European societies.