I had a lecture at Northeastern Political Science Association 53nd Annual Conference which was held online 11-13 November, 2021. My lecture is the following:
Exceptional Governance and COVID-19 in Hungary
The contemporary authoritarian right has rapidly reborn in the field of authoritarian state and emergency power, and the COVID-19 crisis gave a new rise this phenomenon. The failure of liberal democracy opened the way of authoritarian right-wing populism, which on the one hand remained integrated into neoliberal capitalism and on the other hand dismantled the legal basis of liberal constitutionalism. Orbán established his politics from the migration crisis of 2015 on the permanent state of exception. The COVID-19 crisis offered a new opportunity to maintain the emergency. Orbán found the way to capitalise the pandemic crisis and introduced the long-lasting exceptional measures. I argue here that the authoritarian populism entered its new phase and the use of emergency power will be crucial in the era of climate and ecological crisis.
This lecture was prepared and within the postdoc project “The
State of Emergency in the Era of Global Ecological and Pandemic Crisis”
financed by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office,
Postdoctoral Excellence Program of Hungary, ID-number: 139007, hosting
institution: ELTE Faculty of Law and the János Bolyai Research Scholarship,
Hungarian Academy of Science.
