As I said, a first step would be to raise the age for high office (to something like 65 or even 70) for the head of state, and cascade it down proportionally to positions below him/her. The media would hate it, but they are the ones who put us in this mess in the first place…
Then you have to look at the civil service and how to stop revolving-door mechanisms. One idea could be to make appointments over a certain level extremely long – i.e. if you become a director of this or that department, someone with real policy responsibility, you will have to serve at least 8 years, plus another 8 somewhere else in the civil service and another 8 of “garden leave” pension after that, if you end the two terms before you’re 65, with no “moonlighting” allowed. At that point, the choice becomes an “end of career” one rather than a stepping stone to greater things, a proper “call to service”.
These are just random ideas, I’m sure we can come up with better ones. The problem is that, in the end, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas: you cannot expect the establishment to dismantle itself. Real change can come only with new ways of mobilizing grassroot voters.
