Governance under the Covid-19 pandemic: comparative perspectives on Germany and Hungary: Special section “Democratic Health in the Corona Pandemic. The Corona Pandemic as a Trigger or Amplifier of Democratic Erosion?”

By adopting a comparative approach between different regime types, the paper concentrates on Germany and Hungary as case studies for the comparative analysis of the effects the pandemic has had on national governance in the two countries which most strongly represent the growing cleavage between the EU’s liberal Western core and the illiberal Central-Eastern periphery. Methodologically the analysis follows the Most Different Systems Design and examines to what extent the Covid pandemic has functioned as a potential catalyser for the weakening of democratic governance in formerly solid democratic political systems and/or as an accelerator of democratic backsliding in hybrid regimes. For this purpose, the paper examines the process and the content of legislation passed domestically to contain the effects of the pandemic. The analysis shows that even under the stronger coordination of executive decision-making between the federal and regional government level, the foundations of legislative and judicial scrutiny remained resilient during the pandemic in Germany’s multi-level polity, while in Hungary central government has used the pandemic to substantially expand its executive powers at the expense of legislative and judiciary powers.