Pandemic Power Grab

Is Covid-19 undermining European democracies? Recent scholarship on the political effects of the coronavirus crisis overlooks the fact that most pandemic-related erosions of democracy are continuations of previous trends. Many efforts to undermine formal institutions and accountability linkages occurred during the pandemic, not due to it. We analyze the extent to which pandemic power grabs succeeded and failed in Europe. We pay special attention to changes in executive dominance in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia and show that civic activism is a necessary but not a satisfactory condition for democratic resilience. We identify corruption, the “pandemic heist,” as the main source of democratic decay due to the pandemic. The political economy approach unveils mechanisms that directly link opportunities created by the pandemic to power grabs.