The shareholders have started to read the annual report. What they find is uncomfortable: where the strategy should be, the page is blank. From London to Paris, from Buenos Aires’ historic warning to the Swiss Sonderweg, this first half of the column asks what it means when a democracy runs its government like a company that confuses the press release with the business plan. Strategy, execution and the long arithmetic of decline.
Last week the column closed on the immobile pillar of the modern fiscal state. The working population that pays, stays and sustains. The gilets jaunes, the farmers’ blockades, the strikes, the electoral upheavals across the developed world. All described as the visible signature of shareholder dissatisfaction. Contributions rising, dividends falling, management changing. The column ended on the observation that the shareholders had begun to read the annual report.
This week’s question is the next one. What is in the annual report? What, precisely, are the shareholders being asked to evaluate?
In most Western capitals today, the honest answer is uncomfortable. The page is blank where the strategy should be.
An interview is not a plan
British politics has just delivered a useful illustration. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and a senior figure of the Labour movement, has declared his intention to challenge the sitting Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. He is contesting a by-election in the industrial north as the proving ground. Within forty-eight hours of declaring, he had said in one interview that Britain should rejoin the European Union. In the next, he said he wished to focus only on local issues. The thirty-year gilt yield moved toward six percent. The party machine winced. The candidate appeared, on inspection, to be improvising in real time.
A strategy is not something one comes up with in an interview.
An economist watching the episode put the matter cleanly. The line is worth keeping. It captures the precise pathology of a great deal of contemporary Western governance.
The deliberation that produces a coherent doctrine has been replaced by the management of the next press cycle. The strategy is the press release. The press release is the strategy.
This is the symptom. The diagnosis is broader.
A country is not a firm, and yet
Let us state plainly what the temptation is, and then set it aside. A state is not a corporation. Citizens cannot be fired. Markets cannot be exited. Bankruptcy is not a procedure but a regime change. The chief executive answers to quarterly earnings. The head of government answers to history, to a constitution, and to generations who were not consulted. Every era produces its managerial intoxication. Every era is disappointed by it.
And yet. The discipline of strategy travels across both domains, even where the object does not. Honest diagnosis of where one stands. A doctrine articulated clearly enough that adversaries can attack it. Capital allocated against a thesis that will be tested by events. Trade-offs accepted publicly rather than concealed behind a fog of synergies and en même temps. Measurement against falsifiable outcomes. None of this is corporate. All of it is required.
The structural difference is in the time signature. A firm without a strategy collapses inside two quarters because the market is unforgiving. A country without a strategy can drift for a decade. Sovereign debt, institutional ballast and the patience of the governed absorb dysfunction at a much slower rate. That is precisely why the political class gets away with the absence. The bill arrives late, and rarely on the desk that signed for it.
But arrive it does. A historical example sharpens the point in a way no theoretical argument can.
Riche comme un Argentin
In 1913, Argentina ranked among the ten wealthiest nations on earth measured by GDP per capita. The country sat ahead of France, ahead of Germany, ahead of Italy, ahead of Spain. Its income per head was roughly ninety percent of the average of the sixteen richest economies of the day. The French language carried an expression that captured what this meant in the popular imagination. Riche comme un Argentin. Rich as an Argentine. The phrase was used into the 1930s to describe the kind of fortune that defied reasonable measure.
Buenos Aires was the destination of a migration that rivalled the migration to New York. Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Jews, Portuguese arrived to work in the world’s most productive agricultural economy. Half of the capital’s population was foreign-born. Annual GDP growth between 1875 and 1914 averaged above four percent per head. Foreign investment poured in. The country was a credible alternative to the United States as the great land of opportunity in the New World.
A century later, Argentina ranks around seventieth in the world by GDP per capita. It has experienced repeated sovereign defaults, periods of hyperinflation reaching four-digit annual rates, currency collapses that erased generations of savings, and is currently navigating an emergency stabilisation programme under a president elected on the promise of dismantling the political class that produced the wreckage. The peso has lost something on the order of fourteen zeros against the dollar across the past century, depending on which technical reforms one chooses to count.
How does this happen? The historical literature is voluminous and the political readings vary. What is not in dispute is the structural feature. Argentina did not collapse in a single dramatic episode. It collapsed across decades, through a sequence of administrations that each preferred the comfort of the next election to the discomfort of strategic choice. Protectionism without industrial doctrine. Spending without revenue. Promises without accounting. Each individual decision was defensible at the time. The cumulative trajectory was catastrophic. The bill, when it arrived, arrived on the desk of generations that had not signed for any of it.
This is what slow collapse looks like in a sovereign. It does not require an enemy invasion. It requires, simply, the persistent absence of a doctrine maintained across enough electoral cycles for the compounding to do its work.
The bench of those who did write a doctrine
History also offers a bench of cases broad enough that no ideological preference can claim it. They share a method, not a politics.
Napoleon, in the country this writer happens to be from, inherited the wreckage of a revolution. He left an architecture. The Code civil, the Banque de France, the lycées, the prefectoral system, the Conseil d’État. France carries that architecture still. One may detest the man, the wars, the imperial vanity. One cannot deny that a revolution destroys and only institutions consolidate. Napoleon understood this and acted on it.
De Gaulle in 1958. A constitution. A new franc. An independent nuclear deterrent. A national Plan. An industrial doctrine that produced Airbus, Ariane, civil nuclear power. The doctrine was sovereignty. It was articulated against his own base when Algerian independence required it.
Ludwig Erhard in June 1948. Currency reform and price liberalisation executed in a single weekend, against Allied advice, on a doctrine of ordoliberalism written down before it was needed. Bread on the shelves the following Monday. A real policy is one whose outcome is visible quickly and is falsifiable. This one was both.
Deng Xiaoping. Crossing the river by feeling the stones. The phrase sounds improvisational. It conceals the most disciplined long-horizon execution of the late twentieth century. Four modernisations. Special economic zones as a controlled experiment. An explicit acceptance that some would get rich first. The arbitration was public. Forty-five years of compounding followed.
Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Rule of law. English as the working language. Sovereign wealth managed through Temasek and GIC. Pragmatic industrial policy. From third world to first in one generation.
Thatcher and Reagan, for those whom the earlier examples do not reach. Doctrines articulated in opposition, surrounded by competent minds. Volcker held over at the Federal Reserve, Stockman at OMB, Baker at Treasury on the American side. The monetarist apparatus on the British side. Executed across a decade. One may disagree with everything they did. One cannot say that nothing was planned.
The point is not endorsement of any of these doctrines. The point is methodological. All of them diagnosed, articulated, arbitrated, executed, and accepted being judged on outcomes that markets, voters and history could verify.
The Swiss exception
Among the developed economies, one operates on a different model. It is worth examining precisely because it is rarely held up as the systemic alternative it is.
Switzerland holds federal popular votes four times a year. In 2026, the dates are the eighth of March, the fourteenth of June, the twenty-seventh of September and the twenty-ninth of November. Cantonal and communal ballots are layered on top, often on the same day. Since 1848, the federal electorate has been called to the ballot box more than three hundred and thirty times. The optional referendum requires fifty thousand signatures within a hundred days to put any federal law before the population. The popular initiative requires a hundred thousand signatures within eighteen months to put a constitutional amendment to a vote.
What this produces, considered from the standpoint of the manager-and-shareholder framing this series has been developing, is an agile system. The cadence is quarterly. Four release windows per year, each with a defined ballot of questions that have moved through committee, consultation and counter-proposal. Between the windows, the political class works on the next batch. The shareholders are not asked to evaluate the company every five years on a long manifesto. They are asked, four times a year, on specific propositions whose costs and consequences have been published in advance in a federal brochure available in four languages.
What is also true, and rarely remarked on, is that the system produces something none of its larger neighbours now reliably produce. Adherence. Once a decision is taken, the population owns it, because the population took it. The legitimacy of the outcome is not borrowed from the office of whoever announced it. It is generated by the vote itself.
The result, over the long horizon, is a country that runs persistent fiscal surpluses, holds among the lowest sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world, and whose currency the rest of the world treats as a refuge whenever its own institutions wobble. This is not an accident of mountains, or of cheese. It is the macroeconomic dividend of a governance architecture that retains, by design, the mechanism by which the shareholders authorise the management’s strategy.
Part II of this column will be published on June 2nd. It examines the Kodak and Nokia parables, their European counterpart, and the Tuesday question of whether the forgetting is reversible.
Eric Lefebvre:
Read also: The column that won’t move
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