Riding the Covid waves: authoritarian socio-economic responses of east central Europe’s anti-liberal governments

ABSTRACT

The extraordinary context of the COVID-19 crisis gave governments around the world a freer hand to reshape their socio-economic orders. Political economists studying East Central Europe have started a debate in how far democratic backsliding in the region has ushered in a more authoritarian form of capitalism. Our paper examines responses to COVID-19 of four anti-liberal governments in the region: Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Slovenia. Incorporating multiple case studies, it assesses the degree to which growing centralisation of political power has entrenched different mechanisms of authoritarian capitalism, as well as the limits to their use in different national contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-liberalism
• authoritarian capitalism
• COVID-19 crisis
• Hungary
• Poland
• Serbia
• Slovenia

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Political Economy Working Group at the Central European University, Vienna. We would like to thank all participants for their thoughtful comments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for forcing us to clarify our concepts, arguments and empirics. Dorothee Bohle gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the European University Institute’s Research Fund and Gergő Medve-Bálint’s research has been supported by the Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is no consensus in the literature how to conceptualise the right-wing, anti-democratic, authoritarian-leaning governments that have emerged in Eastern Europe and beyond. Most commonly, they are denoted as populist or populist radical right wing (e.g. Enyedi 2016; Müller 2006; Busemeyer and Rathgeb 2022). We see as the ideological core of these forces a stark rejection against the liberal political and economic order that has characterised East European transformation, and therefore call them anti-liberal political forces (see also Fodor 2021; Coman, Behr, and Beyer 2021).

2 At the time of writing of this paper, it is still unclear to what extent the new centre-left government led by Robert Golob will rescind the political appointments in state companies and revise the deals that have already been struck under Janša’s rule.