Political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic facts for kids

Social distancing measures employed at President Rodrigo Duterte's 2020 State of the Nation Address during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines

The political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is the influence that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on politics around the world. The pandemic has affected the governing and political systems of multiple countries, reflected in states of emergency, suspensions of legislative activities, isolation or deaths of multiple politicians and reschedulings of elections due to fears of spreading the virus. The pandemic has triggered broader debates about political issues such as the relative advantages of democracy and autocracy, how states respond to crises, politicization of beliefs about the virus, and the adequacy of existing frameworks of international cooperation. Additionally, the pandemic has, in some cases, posed several challenges to democracy, leading to it being undermined and damaged.

General impacts
Impact on international relations
- European Union
See also

General impacts

Anti-pandemic precautions during the 2020 Czech regional elections

Leader popularity

There is evidence that the pandemic had initially caused a rally 'round the flag effect in many countries, with government approval ratings rising in Italy (+27 percentage points), Germany (+11), France (+11), and the United Kingdom between April and July 2020. This short-term increase has become less pronounced over time, with approval ratings changing often due to how each country has handled the pandemic; the United Kingdom, for example, saw a drop from an approval rating of 51% in March 2020 to 41% in July 2021, while France saw an increase from 27% to 35% in the same time-frame.

In the United States, President Donald Trump saw a 6-point drop in approval, while state governors have seen increases as high as 55 points for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, 31 points for North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, and 30 points for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. A review of polling before and one month into the pandemic suggests that incumbent governments around the world gained on average 4.7% on polls of voting-intention as the rally-round-the-flag effect kicked in, with governments who went to re-election during the pandemic mostly maintaining said improvement up until their election.

In Israel, the virus begun to rapidly spread after the March 2020 election. The incumbent PM Benjamin Netanyahu did not win enough seats to form a coalition, and the presidential mandate to form a coalition was given to his contender, Benny Gantz. However, Netanyahu's pandemic politics brought his party the Likud to reach peak public support (41-43 seats during the first wave of April–May 2020), pushing Gantz to ask Israel's president to transfer the mandate to Netanyahu so that the latter could form, and head, a new government.

States of emergency

At least 84 countries declared a state of emergency in response to the pandemic, which led to fears about misuse of power. Reporters Without Borders has claimed that 38 countries have restricted freedom of the press as a result. Other examples include banning mass protests, postponing elections or holding them while the opposition cannot effectively campaign, selectively enforcing lockdown rules on political opponents, handing out relief payments to political supporters, or scapegoating minorities. Many countries have also unveiled large-scale surveillance programs for contact tracing, leading to worries about effects on privacy.

Human rights and freedoms

Whilst the emergency powers enacted by governments in order to stem the spread of the pandemic were made in the interests of protecting public health and minimizing risk to countries' economies and crucial services such as health care, they have inadvertently led to concerns over human rights and civil liberties. The government response seen in the Philippines led to accusations of government forces violently detaining citizens who flouted public health restriction laws. Violent clashes between citizens and armed government authorities have also been seen in countries including Greece, the United States, and Germany.

Human rights and civil liberties have also been threatened through digital surveillance technology by multiple governments, leading to concerns over human rights to privacy, freedom, expression and association. The Ecuadorean government introduced a new GPS tracking system without associated data handling legislation, leaving users' details exposed and insecure. In South Korea, health authorities launched a track and trace app which asked users to disclose personal information, leading to concerns over both privacy and the potential for discrimination. Furthermore, the right to freedom of movement has been curtailed by many national governments during the pandemic, with 186 countries enacting border restrictions in response to the pandemic.

In relation, the ongoing discrimination faced by minorities, in particular, has also been a root cause in the socio-economic factors which has affected the freedoms and rights of the most vulnerable populations.

Democracy

According to a 2020 Freedom House report, "the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a crisis for democracy around the world". The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up gaps in the action of democracy, largely due to the heavy practical and logistical disruption the virus and its subsequent "lockdown" restrictions have caused. Across the world, national governments found themselves with no other choice but to suspend, cancel, or postpone numerous democratic elections at both national and subnational governmental levels. The 2020 Freedom House report also highlighted a variety of responses relating to government mishandling of the pandemic against the best interests of its citizens, such as denial of the existence of COVID-19 in Turkmenistan and Nicaragua, and the promotion of unsafe or unproven treatments in Brazil and Tanzania.

This is due to factors that have been weakened such as "checks against abuses of power, protection of vulnerable groups, transparency and anti-corruption, free media and expression, and credible elections." As governments were entrusted with unprecedented powers to protect public health, even the strongest democracies "failed to guard themselves against abuse of power," said an op-ed on Newsweek. This is because, emergency powers grant governments the ability to '"make regulations without an act of parliament" These powers are typically intended to take "rapid action" and combat instability. Emergency powers have been used by some governments to extend state power This arguably occurred in Moscow, where tens of thousands of cameras with facial-recognition features were supposedly installed to track contagion, however, these systems risk remaining in place after the pandemic. According to a 2020 Brookings Institution report, "the challenges posed by the need for mass surveillance suggest that the resilience of democratic regimes cannot be taken for granted". The same study highlighted foreign disinformation surrounding COVID-19 as a threat to democracy, stating that the pandemic presented an opportunity for malign actors to "multiply the production of fake news, conspiracy theories, and manipulated information", it further stated that "Russia and China exploited the chaos induced by COVID-19 to promote their geopolitical interests and continue to destabilise western democracies".

An article on the journal Democratic Theory comments that the side effect of COVID-19 and will have a "long-term effect on established democracies around the world". Part of this long-term effect includes the increasing prevalence of democratic backsliding; while proportional responses to a global pandemic are necessary, excessive measures under abusive enforcement have raised concerns that democracy, in nations where it is already unstable, is declining worldwide.

Media freedom

Media freedom, in its many forms, has also been greatly impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple governments introduced restrictions on websites to prevent reportage on the spread of misinformation and hide poor representations of themselves.

The Chinese government attempted to control the global narrative on their initial unwillingness and inability to contain the initial outbreak by censoring millions of pieces of content containing over 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic on the leading communication platform WeChat and the live-streaming platform YY. In addition, nations such as Bangladesh and Egypt have blocked international news outlets from their respective Internet systems under the guise of spreading false information. This removal of the ability of media outlets to criticise governments represented a breach of freedom of expression under Article 19 of the UDHR. These restrictions allowed media outlets and journalists to be prosecuted and imprisoned more easily, often unfairly and arbitrarily.

Political discourse

Abulof, Le Penne and Pu analyzed public discourse through the NOW (News on the Web) corpus and Google Trends. Their findings indicate that 2020 saw a dramatic rise in thinking about ‘death’ and ‘mortality,’ worldwide. They also found that the words most associated with this morbidity since 2004 are ‘Covid’ and ‘coronavirus,’ and that similar trends appear in other languages. They argue that the rise is due to both the pandemic itself and pandemic politics – politicians fostering, using, and abusing, existential anxiety on a mass scale.

In another discourse analysis, speeches about the pandemic delivered by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro show ideological polarization to be the most frequent strategy, suggesting that political discourse can be a potential source of societal manipulation. A study on speeches made by 20 heads of government around the world during the pandemic shows that women spoke more frequently about the pandemic's impact on the individual, while men underscored war metaphors to describe COVID-19 and their response.

Impact on international relations

European Union

The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated that "If we don't propose now a unified, powerful and effective response to this economic crisis, not only the impact will be tougher, but its effects will last longer and we will be putting at risk the entire European project", while the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte commented that "the whole European project risks losing its raison d'être in the eyes of our own citizens". From 4 to 19 March, Germany banned the export of personal protective equipment, and France also restricted exports of medical equipment, drawing criticism from EU officials who called for solidarity. Many Schengen Area countries closed their borders to stem the spread of the virus.

Jointly issued debt

Debates over how to respond to the epidemic and its economic fallout have opened up a rift between Northern and Southern European member states, reminiscent of debates over the 2010s European debt crisis. Nine EU countries—Italy, France, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and Luxembourg—called for "corona bonds" (a type of eurobond) in order to help their countries to recover from the epidemic, on 25 March. Their letter stated, "The case for such a common instrument is strong, since we are all facing a symmetric external shock." Northern European countries such as Germany, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands oppose the issuing of joint debt, fearing that they would have to pay it back in the event of a default. Instead, they propose that countries should apply for loans from the European Stability Mechanism. Corona bonds were discussed on 26 March 2020 in a European Council meeting, which dragged out for three hours longer than expected due to the "emotional" reactions of the prime ministers of Spain and Italy. European Council President Charles Michel and European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde have urged the EU to consider issuing joint debt. Unlike the European debt crisis—partly caused by the affected countries—southern European countries did not cause the coronavirus pandemic, therefore eliminating the appeal to national responsibility.

Civil liberties

Many countries resorted to states of emergency, curtailing civil liberties and awarding executives wider powers. Sixteen member nations of the European Union issued a statement warning that certain emergency measures issued by countries during the coronavirus pandemic could undermine the principles of rule of law and democracy on 1 April. They announced that they "support the European Commission initiative to monitor the emergency measures and their application to ensure the fundamental values of the Union are upheld." The statement does not mention Hungary, but observers believe that it implicitly refers to a Hungarian law granting plenary power to the Hungarian Government during the coronavirus pandemic. The following day, the Hungarian Government joined the statement.

The Hungarian parliament passed the law granting plenary power to the Government by qualified majority, 137 to 53 votes in favor, on 30 March 2020. After promulgating the law, the President of Hungary, János Áder, announced that he had concluded that the time frame of the Government's authorization would be definite and its scope would be limited. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, stated that she was concerned about the Hungarian emergency measures and that it should be limited to what is necessary and Minister of State Michael Roth suggested that economic sanctions should be used against Hungary.

The heads of thirteen member parties of the European People's Party (EPP) made a proposal to expunge the Hungarian Fidesz for the new legislation on 2 April. In response, Viktor Orbán expressed his willingness to discuss any issues relating to Fidesz's membership "once the pandemic is over" in a letter addressed to the Secretary General of EPP Antonio López-Istúriz White. Referring to the thirteen leading politicians' proposal, Orbán also stated that "I can hardly imagine that any of us having time for fantasies about the intentions of other countries. This seems to be a costly luxury these days." During a video conference of the foreign ministers of the European Union member states on 3 April 2020, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Péter Szijjártó, asked for the other ministers to read the legislation itself not its politically motivated presentations in newspapers before commenting on it.

Brexit

The pandemic had an impact on the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union, with border checks on EU imports initially delayed until July 2021 and then delayed again to 2022 in an attempt to mitigate supply issues caused by the pandemic. The European Commission–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine dispute also led to a dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Some analysts have suggested that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom has masked the impacts of Brexit on the UK.