Emergency Power in Hungary and the COVID-19 (ASEEES Annual Convention, 3 December, 2021)

 I had an online lecture at 53rd ASEEES Annual Convention at the COVID-19 in East-Central Europe: Diverse Policy Responses to the Pandemic panel.

My lecture: Emergency Power in Hungary and the COVID-19 Crisis

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 capitalize 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 is a part of my research project "The State of Emergency in the Era of Global Ecological and Pandemic Crisis" (financed by National Research, Development and Innovation Office Postdoctoral Excellence Programme of Hungary, ID-number: 139007, hosting institution: ELTE Faculty of Law). More details on this project: https://www.stateofemergency.hu/

In the panel there were the following lectures delivered by my distinguished Colleagues in terms of Central and Eastern Europe and the pandmic crisis:

Krzysztof Brzechczyn: Between Safety and Freedom: The Dilemmas of Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poland

Vitezslav Sommer: State, Experts and Legacies of Long Transformation: COVID-19 Controversies in the Czech Republic

Dragos Petrescu: Path Dependence, Legal (In)Security, Digital Solutions: Contradictory Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis in Romania

This lecture was prepared and written 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.