ABSTRACT
There was dancing in the streets in Spain at midnight, as 9 May turned into 10 May 2021, and the state of emergency lapsed - in the official argot, a "state of alarm," under which the Spanish government had imposed nationwide Coronavirus restrictions. The first COVID-19 lockdown lasted 94 days. The second one went on for nearly seven months. This chapter examines the challenge and the response of Spanish law, government, and society to the unprecedented global pandemic in 2020-2021, especially in the aspect of the state of emergency as government in the extreme. Spain - as in: Spanish law and society - maintains a peculiar or perhaps peculiarly Spanish relationship to emergency laws, which, broadly speaking, prove troublesome in other democracies, particularly those with totalitarian or authoritarian legacies within a human memory. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 response in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not entail a declaration of a state of emergency. No provisions or procedures of the German constitution were suspended at any point. To be sure, the FRG's COVID response - including lockdowns, travel bans, hygiene rules, mask guidelines, distancing, testing, tracing, immunization plans, and so on - represents something other than business as usual. According to the Federal Ministry of Health, Germany's first official case of COVID-19 occurred in a man in the southern state of Bavaria on 27 January 2020. Germany's success with the first wave may have wrongly inflected overly buoyant expectations about successive waves - at all levels of politics and society - for better and worse. Either way, things were about to get weird in the FRG, although at first, the summer seemed to be shaping up rather nicely as SARS-CoV-2 restrictions eased. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the chronology as well as the cause-and-effect of the evolution of the rule of law, state power, public health, and popular will in Austria. While some European Union (EU) states had enacted vaccine mandates for older residents, and other European countries required COVID-19 vaccines of health-care workers, Austria's more-or-less universal Impfpflicht for adults represented a new milestone in the EU amid the crises of the twenty-first century. In parliament as well as in the new and old media, the most prominent objectors to the vaccine mandate hailed from the populist nationalist-right Freedom Party of Austria. Starting in 2009, Austria faced its own share of the sovereign debt misery or eurozone crisis. Despite the Sturm, Drang, and sordid scandal of the last decade or so, Austria's Sozialstaat is neither down nor out. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.