ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how and why the COVID-19 offered a window of opportunity to accelerate authoritarian evolution in Hungary and Poland. The main argument is that multiple parallel crises provide illiberal regimes an invaluable leverage to consolidate their institutions and values. The pandemic overlapped with an underlying existential crisis that exacerbated the cumulating clashes with the European Union (EU) over the erosion of the rule of law and governance. The Hungarian and Polish power elites invented crisis strategies by which to navigate profound national interest and neutralise exogenous pressures from the EU. By analysing legal sources, official state documents, public and parliamentary debates, media references, and crisis legislation, this chapter unpacks the step-by-step process of how the disease was instrumentalised over the two years’ time of the pandemic. Methodologically, the investigation relies on identifying three types of crisis management techniques, which also reveal the main purpose of the legislative processes, such as (a) power-boosting effort, (b) atmosphere-tuning goal, and (c) constituency-building outreach. Theoretically, this chapter explores the link between complex in-between-ness and temporal crossroad moment and analysed through the prism of the concept of state of exception introduced by Carl Schmidt.
