ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the democratic order came to have an unlikely savior, in the form of the COVID-19 virus. While the pandemic brought devastation to individuals and societies, the very strategies necessary to counteract it all helped to undermine fundamental pillars on which populism had been built. And when risks to public health began to outweigh crime risks, making the law and order issues that populism thrives on largely redundant, the politics of hate and destruction that it espouses suffered important political reversals.
