Populism unrestrained: Policy responses of the Orbán regime to the pandemic in 2020–2021

The paper provides a case study on how the Orbán regime in Hungary has dealt with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in 2020–2021. Despite having led worldwide rankings in pandemic-related death rates since the second part of 2020, the government was not politically shaken by COVID-19. Institutionally unrestrained, the governing majority periodically renewed emergency legal regimes to control public discourses and curtail the financial resources of opposition-led local governments. The policy conduct of the regime is discussed in the context of authoritarian populism, which is conceptualized along a strategy-based approach to populism. In this, authoritarian populism is seen to generate democratic legitimacy for dismantling the institutional foundations of liberal democracy and the rule of law. This had been happening in Hungary well before COVID-19 kicked in, but the pandemic provided enhanced opportunities for this strategy. Meanwhile, fiscal policies became increasingly expansionary, signalling a partial return to the practice of preelection overspending. © 2022 The Authors. European Policy Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization.

Multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions shaped the early outbreak in Central Eastern Europe: comparing Hungarian data to a worldwide sequence data-matrix (preprint)

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 is the third highly pathogenic human coronavirus in history. Since the emergence in Hubei province, China, during late 2019 the situation evolved to pandemic level. Following China, Europe was the second epicenter of the pandemic. To better comprehend the detailed founder mechanisms of the epidemic evolution in Central-Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary, we determined the full-length SARS-CoV-2 genomes from 32 clinical samples collected from laboratory confirmed COVID-19 patients over the first month of disease in Hungary. We applied a haplotype network analysis on all available complete genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from GISAID database as of the 21th of April, 2020. We performed additional phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses to achieve the recognition of multiple and parallel introductory events into our region. Here we present a publicly available network imaging of the worldwide haplotype relations of SARS-CoV-2 sequences and conclude the founder mechanisms of the outbreak in Central-Eastern Europe.