Impacts of the Covid pandemic on the democracies of EU countries

Christian Kvorning Lassen from the Institute for European Policy EUROPEUM together with Jan Kovář from the Institute of International Relations wrote a comment "Disastrous pandemic management puts the Czech Republic at a critical democratic juncture" for the EPIN Report on the impact of the COVID pandemic on EU democracies.

To better understand how the pandemic has so far affected Europe’s democracies, the European Policy Institutes Network (EPIN) has analyzed 19 succinct national perspectives. The main research question was what are the effects of different crisis rules or procedures on the democratic character of national governance?  

Almost a year on, the worst fears about the institutional implications of pandemic governance for democracy in Czechia seem, fortunately, to have been largely unwarranted. This is not to say that there are no adverse repercussions. People’s fundamental rights and freedoms are still restricted; media scrutiny is complicated by the inability of some journalists to be physically present ‘on the ground’; routine legislative parliamentary activity seems to have slackened; the judiciary had to adapt to digital proceedings and acts at a slower pace than normal. During the state of emergency, the various measures to address the pandemic are in the hands of the government, with Parliament in a weak position to scrutinise, much less to influence them 

   

Christian Kvorning Lassen
Deputy Director & Head of Research

Expertise: Migration/European migration crisis, EU foreign policy, Scandinavian politics, populism, EU enlargement policy