The Populists
 and the Pandemic

2020

Two articles on populism and the pandemic. The first brief commentary was originally published at ‘Populism’, the newsletter of the Populism Specialist Group, PSA Issue 2, July 2020. https://issuu.com/populism/docs/populism_newsletter_2. The second one, focused on the case of Greece, was included in the report "Populism and the Pandemic" edited by Giorgos Katsambekis and Yannis Stavrakakis.

Political Populism, 2021

Mezinárodní vztahy

With the Covid-19 pandemic dominating the agenda, it seems almost natural that it be associated with another buzzword: populism. As the pandemic advances, it seems that the prediction of populism surviving the pandemic due to its own diversity has been proved right, given the variation in responses by populists around the world. One common denominator stands out though: populists across the political spectrum understood the benefits of performing the Covid-19 crisis as a tool to strengthen their political positions. They tried to politicize the pandemic to increase the antagonism between the people and the elites. In this article, I introduce the notion of crisis as both a construct and a performance, and as a useful concept to analyze populist reactions to the pandemic. I argue that notwithstanding the attempts to politicize the pandemic, the Covid-19 crisis ended up imposing its own reality. In other words: the crisis could not be owned by politics.

POPULISMUS interventions No. 7 (special edition), 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic dominating the public sphere in recent months and no aspect of social and political life left unaffected, it seems almost natural that this unprecedented public health crisis would soon be reflected on discussions around the other buzzword of our time: populism. This report aims at providing a concise yet rigorous global comparative mapping of populist politics in the context of the ongoing pandemic. This will not only shed further light on the specificities, the potentials and limitations of the phenomenon, but we also expect it to highlight its irreducible heterogeneity and diversity as a way of doing politics.The key questions that we posed to contributors in this report when looking at different countries across the world can be summarised as follows: • How have populist actors reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic when in government or opposition? • Has their ideological position on the left or right, or indeed somewhere inbetween, played a role to that reaction? • How have the rates of approval and vote intensions for populist actors developed during that period? • More generally, how have discussions around ‘populism’ and the role of ‘experts’ and ‘science’ developed in each country during this time? Have they reproduced standard anti-populist stereotypes? In order to shed light on these crucial aspects of the discussion and set the agenda for future comparative research as well as conceptual enquiry, we approached a series of well established scholars, along with several dynamic younger researchers specialising on both populism and the study of politics in different countries and regions. This gave us a sum of sixteen (16) case studies of countries and political actors from across the world, making the scope of our report truly global, extending from Australia to Sweden and from the Philippines to Brazil and the United States.

Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2021

Politics and Governance

How do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocratic populists in power during the first wave of the novel coronavirus crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We identify three features of the populist pandemic response. First, populists bypassed established, institutionalized channels of crisis response. Second, they engaged in erratic yet responsive policy making. These two features are ubiquitous to populism. The third feature, specific to technocratic populism, is the politicization of expertise in order to gain legitimacy. Technocratic populists in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia weaponized medical expertise for political purposes.

Populism and the Politicization of the COVID-19 Crisis in Europe, 2021

Journal of Populism Studies (2022), pp. 1- 27, 2023

The relevant literature shows that populists come to power through various rhetorics by exploiting the incumbent orders and the problems they have caused. However, failures and disappointments in fulfilling their promises push them to employ increasingly authoritarian measures to silence society to stay in power by gradually changing the system, manipulating citizens through controlling media, and undermining fundamental institutions. By emphasizing the overall performance of populist governments during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, this article explores the future course of populist politics and governments after the pandemic. The paper concludes that although the pandemic has clearly shown the limits and capacity of many populist governments, the political and economic conjuncture in the post-pandemic era, coupled with the high tension of power transition might bring new “opportunities” for the use of populists. With several defects and structural weaknesses of the existing liberal multilateral order, populism is here to stay with different implications for the multilateral liberal order and globalization.

SocArXiv, 2020

Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has presented itself as anti-protectionist during the pandemic and challenged the allegedly overprotective restrictions of the nanny-state. I address each apparent paradox in turn before speculating in conclusion about how populist distrust of expertise, antipathy to government regulation, and skepticism toward elite overprotectiveness may come together – in the context of intersecting medical, economic, political, and epistemic crises – in a potent and potentially dangerous mix.

global-e, 2020