Not dead yet: Protest, process, and germany's constitutional democracy amid the coronavirus response

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.