Authoritarianism and Pandemics: China, Turkey, and Hungary

The COVID crisis has demonstrated how the divide between democracies and autocracies affects the lives of people in both types of societies, in critical ways. In this chapter, I focus on how authoritarian governments have responded to the pandemic politically, economically, and socially. Attending to the specific cases of China, Turkey, and Hungary, I examine how the state of emergency induced by the pandemic has served some authoritarian regimes, how their power over their populations has increased, and how they have found in COVID a political opportunity.