Sorry I cant find the part that mention political reasons in OP. I thought Multefire never took off was simply licensing issues.
The idea of being able to deliver a full mobile service to mobile phones is "sellable" - operators like to think of themselves as being the only ones able to provide the service people expect to a mobile handset. Then they can bundle handsets with service provision.
If you are interested in this topic, it's worth looking at the fraught relationship between mobile operators and WiFi. Operators historically rejected WiFi from handsets early on - WiFi was a rival to their high-price, high-margin mobile data services. Until perhaps the mid-3G days, when the idea of using WiFi for offload, due to the limited spectrum for mobile data started to become a tempting idea for operators.
Even that's controversial - the "enterprise" market around WiFi wasn't hugely keen on that either, since they felt the mobile operators were just trying to snap up and freeload on the license-exempt spectrum for extra capacity, and use up (finite) WiFi spectrum capacity while providing an operator-badged service.
In my view, Multefire hasn't taken off due to the general high complexity of the tech stack people would need to understand to use it (fine for me with a telecoms engineering background, less fine if you are from the pure IT world and just want something quick - it's a lot more effort and complexity than setting up a couple of WiFi APs), and the lack of pressure from mobile operators to support it. Handset support for features comes from operator demand/desire. Multefire isn't something handset makers will add, unless operators demand it. Absent that, it risks alienating or upsetting them, by opening up the handsets to competition, and since operators are the main route to market for your handsets, market dictates the rules...
There are unlicensed variants of LTE/5G, but worth noting that these often are designed to use the unlicensed spectrum as supplemental downlink (i.e. License Assisted Access (LAA) in LTE), rather than actually allowing for uplink and downlink in the unlicensed spectrum.
The reason for that is simple politics - mobile operators are powerful lobbyists, and part of a powerful standards group (GSMA), and don't really fancy the idea you should be able to run what a customer will perceive as a mobile network without significant investment in spectrum (a finite resource).
LTE-U and LAA won't let you run a network by yourself just on unlicensed spectrum. Multefire should, but is quite rare for the obvious political reasons outlined above.