Coronavirus and Autocrats: Never Let Pandemic Go to Waste
For authoritarian-minded leaders world-wide, health emergency presents opportunity to weaken democracy
By Yaroslav Trofimov
March 28, 2020 9:00 am ETWith much of the world on lockdown, the coronavirus pandemic has chipped away at individual liberties everywhere. In more places, however, it is also being used as an excuse to weaken democratic institutions and oversight—an authoritarian slide that could endure once the current health emergency subsides.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin this month pushed through parliament the removal of term limits, ensuring he could remain in power for life, just as the fear of the coronavirus has rendered public protests against these constitutional changes impossible.
In Bolivia, the interim and unelected government has canceled presidential elections slated for May. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is moving ahead with legislation that would allow him to rule by decree and imprison people spreading “falsehoods.”
And in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party this week used the coronavirus crisis to prevent the opposition, which gained a majority of seats in the March 2 elections, from taking control of parliamentary proceedings. The gambit Thursday resulted in the opposition’s breakup, with part of it opting for a unity government. A separate decision by the Israeli government to shut down courts also scuttled Mr. Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which had been set to begin March 17.
To authoritarian-minded politicians world-wide, the coronavirus emergency is turning into a godsend, said Kati Piri, a Hungarian-born Dutch member of the European Parliament.
“These people never let a good crisis to be wasted,” she said. “We have only been in this crisis for about 10 days, and we know that, unfortunately, this will last not weeks but perhaps many months. With an anxious public in already very polarized countries, anything can happen.”
Indeed, the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic—which just in the past two weeks killed several thousand people in Europe and in the U.S.—has already generated unprecedented restrictions on fundamental liberties in much of the West.
Following China’s apparently successful example in containing the virus through shutting down public life, Italy and then other European nations, as well as state and local governments in the U.S. in recent weeks banned citizens from leaving homes except for basic necessities. Countries such as South Korea and Israel have used intrusive surveillance and phone-tracking technology to find and isolate suspected coronavirus carriers. “End of Freedom,” went the banner headline in London’s Daily Telegraph when the U.K. became the latest European nation to go on lockdown earlier this week.
These restrictions, even if they lead to the postponement of elections in some countries, don’t by themselves alter nations’ democratic nature. The U.K., after all, remained a democracy through World War II even though its draconian wartime legislation was used to imprison suspected subversives without trial, said François Heisbourg, a former French national-security official and a scholar at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “In wartime, freedom goes down the tube, but democracy doesn’t go down the tube.”
With the world on a war footing these days, national leaders will be judged primarily by whether they are able to contain the disease, he added. “The relevant question is, are we going to win or lose in the face of an enemy, and the enemy happens to be the virus,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “Some politicians will want to do it to preserve our way of life and our democracy, and others—the autocrats—will do it to increase their power. But what will determine who profits is who will be more effective in beating the virus.”
The problem, of course, is that the coronavirus pandemic swept the world at a time when democracy was already under attack—both because of the rise of authoritarian politicians in nations from the Philippines to Turkey to Brazil, and because of China’s effort to present itself as an alternative model to the Western liberal order.
Freedom House, an organization that tracks political freedoms and individual liberties world-wide, has noted that 2019 marked the 14th consecutive year of the global freedom decline.
“We were already at the precipice. The fears and the anxieties were already there, and now you inject the virus on top of that,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based research institute. “We now find ourselves in a really dangerous place for maintaining a democratic future. I can see us coming out of the public-health crisis that we are currently in with many more people buying into the notion that authoritarian states are better equipped to deal with future crises.”
China’s propaganda apparatus has already launched an all-out effort at home and abroad to portray its ability to contain the virus as testament to the superiority of its party-state system—and is sending planeloads of medical supplies and doctors to virus-stricken European nations.
The Kremlin has joined the bandwagon, with Russian military trucks laden with supplies parading through the streets of Italy this week. The initial wavering and slow decision-making that allowed the virus to spread in Europe and the U.S. have been described with near-glee on Russian TV. Moscow insists that it is able to keep the infection at relatively low levels—despite reports of many hidden cases—and hasn’t imposed a lockdown so far.
“As far as the Russian leadership is concerned, this crisis confirms its worldview that the Western systems are inefficient, and that the liberal political model simply can’t cope,” said Andrey Kortunov, director-general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a government think tank in Moscow.
Other authoritarian regimes are drawing similar conclusions. In Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev last week labeled his political opposition as national traitors endangering public health. “During the existence of the disease,” Mr. Aliyev said, “isolation of the representatives of the fifth column will become a historical necessity.”
Though Azerbaijan is an extreme example, the coronavirus pandemic potentially threatens democracy in many other places.
“In a moment of crisis, when people are fearful, they are looking to authorities to reassure them, and they are willing to give leaders additional tools to manage chaos and limit risk,” said Daniel Shapiro, a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. “The danger is that these tools that exceed the limits of the normal democratic system may not be returned after the crisis is over. That’s the balance that every democracy faces in a moment of crisis like this.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-autocrats-never-let-pandemic-go-to-waste-11585400400
And elsewhere:
Kenya’s coronavirus curfew begins with wave of police crackdowns
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/kenyas-coronavirus-curfew-begins-with-wave-of-police-crackdowns/2020/03/28/358327aa-7064-11ea-a156-0048b62cdb51_story.html
Police in India physically strike people who violate coronavirus lockdown: report
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/489676-baton-wielding-police-strike-people-violating-lockdown
CRACKDOWN Coronavirus – French cops are now arresting and LOCKING UP anybody who breaks strict lockdown
https://www.the-sun.com/news/567449/coronavirus-french-cops-are-now-arresting-and-locking-up-anybody-who-breaks-strict-lockdown/
Morocco Makes a Dozen Arrests Over Coronavirus Fake News
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-morocco/morocco-makes-a-dozen-arrests-over-coronavirus-fake-news-idUSKBN2162DI
I'm not sure locking people up in confined spaces (and police taking care of them) is a good solution. I know a lot of countries have been fining for some time. My brother lives in Spain and they locked things down as soon as Italy's cases surged.
I can see the conspiracy theorists say Russia planned this all along like a Bond movie villain - helped elect an incompetent buffoon to the most powerful office in the world, dropped a virus in the most populous communist country and entered disaster zones as health and economic liberators.
If this thing gets worse b4 better, as many have been saying, then what’s happening in those places (Morocco, India, Kenya, France) will for sure spread here in the same fashion as the virus itself
MARTIAL LAW
The states with the beat them into submission ideology will grow a bumper crop of dissidents and treat them badly. I know the Gestapo tactics some countries use on people they arrest. There will be curfews and restrictions placed on people here. I saw news that since New Orleans's people are staying home the rats have less garbage to eat from since the restaurants are closed. They are prowling around in the streets looking for food.
People have to maintain their humanity otherwise the military will come out and force you to comply. You don't want that.
New Law Gives Sweeping Powers To Hungary's Orban, Alarming Rights Advocates
March 30, 20209:55 AM ET
The nationalist government in Hungary passed a law Monday granting sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Those powers include sidelining parliament and giving Orban the power to rule by decree indefinitely. The law would punish those who spread false information about the pandemic with up to five years in prison.
"Changing our lives is now unavoidable," Orban told lawmakers last week. "Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary."
During Monday's vote, he said: "When this emergency ends, we will give back all powers, without exception."
But critics insist that Orban is using the pandemic to grab power. "An indefinite and uncontrolled state of emergency cannot guarantee that the basic principles of democracy will be observed," Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejcinovic Buric wrote to Orban on March 24.
Orban rose to prominence in the European Union in 2015 by slamming the EU's open-door response to asylum-seekers. As Hungary's prime minister for the past decade, he has upset EU leaders by weakening his country's judicial and parliamentary systems to stifle opposition.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Hungary expert at Princeton University, says Orban has stretched the law like no one else.
"Bolsanaro in Brazil, Kaczynski in Poland ... Trump in the United States, all of them have thought about using emergency powers. But no one has yet gone as far as Orban to really shut down democracy as anybody knew it in Hungary before," she says.
Orban is popular with Hungarians, but even supporters of his Fidesz party are concerned about the country's health care system, says Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with Policy Solutions, a left-leaning think tank in Budapest.
"The irony is that the government is giving itself extreme powers,"
he says, but "it is not taking any extreme measures" when it comes to combating the coronavirus.Zsofia Kollanyi, a health policy expert at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, describes hospitals without basic sanitation such as toilet paper and soap, as well as severe staff shortages.
"It's not just that there are not enough nurses and doctors but also that we are spending ... less and less on health care," she says. "That's something that's got to change, especially now."
Hungary has confirmed more than 440 cases of COVID-19 and 15 deaths, far fewer than most other European countries, though not much of Hungary's population has been tested. The health system is ill-prepared to handle testing because it lacks epidemiologists, who left after repeated restructuring in the past 15 years bled it dry, according to a report by the investigative reporting outlet Direkt 36.
Scheppele calls the health care system Orban's "Achilles' heel."
"And suddenly this giant arrow comes out of the sky and hits him right in the Achilles' heel," she says. "That's what this pandemic is."
Mate Halmos contributed reporting from Budapest.
