How will the pandemic shape this year's politics? And will there be any positives from the pandemic?
As vaccinations are getting distributed and injected it’s easy to dream of the future when life returns to as it were before the virus. As I’ve said in several posts, I despise empty talk of how the world is permanently and fundamentally changed by the pandemic, as that strikes me as very unlikely. But there are some things that might really change after the pandemic is over, particularly politics. In fact the optimistic case for 2021, which I will present in this post, is that the pandemic leads to the early 2020’s being a time of increased political innovation. It might still be a while before that, unfortunately. Before the pandemic is over expect to hear much more about the vaccination process and the issues which will crop up along the way. This could be a sample bias on my part, but the media coverage of the pandemic has been quite negative. That should not come as a surprise, the pandemic is and has been a negative event. I have no experience in medicine or epidemiology so my interest lies in the politics of it. Few events are as bad for politicians’ re-election prospects as long periods of consistent bas news such as epidemics and recessions.
There was a plethora of reasons for why the US 2020 election turned out the way it did, but the pandemic might’ve been a contributing factor. With the number of elections planned for 2021 it’ll be interesting to see whether there’s a pattern of incumbents losing after a year of pandemic. There are elections in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Japan, Iran, and Israel; and those are just the ones I would be interested in following. There are many, many more of course. Enough that one could probably find statistical evidence for if the pandemic has had a real political impact.
Perhaps not the most unique take, but I think the pandemic has had an impact. I expect most incumbent governments to lose their elections. Now that’s not to say that the pandemic was the only factor in the outcome, but global events with wide-reaching medical, social, and economic implications are rare and logically must affect politics. This conclusion in itself isn’t especially interesting or unique, the real question for me is how the losing incumbent parties and candidates go forward.
There’s a real chance that several parties will make the post-election analysis that their loss was due to their policy agenda rather than the pandemic which could very well lead to a change in politics going forward. If a sizeable number of elections lead to the incumbents being thrown out of office there are good chances that the early 2020’s will be a time of political innovation as new parties less used to governing get a chance at policymaking at the same time as traditional governing parties have to reinvent themselves. Let’s at least hope so, it’d be great if something at all good came of Covid-19.
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Written by Karl Johansson
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