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HUMAN DIGNITY AND ‘ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY’ IN TIME OF CRISIS
As Francis Fukuyama argues, it is not a matter of regime type, why some coun¬
tries have done better than others in dealing with the crisis so far.” Some democ¬
racies have performed well, but others have not, and the same is true for autocra¬
cies. Therefore, for him the factors responsible for successful pandemic responses
have been state capacity, social trust, and leadership. Indeed, one can think on the
old democracies, such as the US and the UK, which did not perform well due to
lack of state capacity and/or effective leadership. On the other hand, all the states
he mentioned, which have used the crisis to give themselves emergency powers,
moving them still further away from democracy happen to be non-democracies.
Like Hungary, where on the orders of the Hungarian health minister 36,000 hos¬
pital beds were cleared across the country — mostly by ejecting terminally and
chronically ill patients from these hospitals and sending them home.* Nurses were
frantically explaining to family members how to change drips and bandages, how
to administer shots, how to look for dangerous turns in these patients’ conditions.
As a consequence, tens of thousands of Hungarian families were isolated at home
with sick and dying loved ones who should have had hospital care. Two hospital
directors were fired for resisting the government’s orders, which overrode doctors’
assessments of what was best for their patients’ health." Never mind that the real
need for beds was about a tenth of the government estimates this measure alone
violated human dignity and in some cases the right to life of the patients. This is
the same denial of solidarity and treatment of human beings as non-equal in their
humanity, and with this undermining democracy during the 2015 migration crisis
by the Hungarian government. The ninth amendment to the Hungarian Fundamen¬
tal Law, introduced in November 2020 amidst the second wave of the pandemic,
used the pandemic as a pretext to fix children’s gender identity at birth so that later
gender changes can never be reflected on the birth register. By blatantly rejecting
the self-determination rights of the children as part of their human dignity, this
new provision reads:
Emergency Violates Rule of Law, Verfassungsblog (22 April 2020), https://verfassungsblog.
de/dont-be-fooled-by-autocrats/?fbclid=IwA Rly2QoJktMihGxcp5G5QGkR8NZ9WerG6z
3fHj808QDiIHMPPym1XEB-x3cM.
Francis Fukuyama, Pandemic and Political Order, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2020),
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/pandemic-and-political- order.
Hungary prepares for the worst and empties tens of thousands of hospital beds, Bune
Intellinews (20 April 2020), https://www.intellinews.com/hungary-prepares-for-the-worst¬
and-empties-tens-of-thousands-of-hospital-beds-181318/.
Hungarian Spectrum, Miklös Käsler’s Housecleaning Hits a Nerve in Certain Fidesz Cricles,
Hungarian Spectrum (15 April 2020), https://hungarianspectrum.org/2020/04/15/miklos¬
kaslers-housecleaning-hits-a-nerve-in-certain-fidesz-circles/.
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