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populism
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2022-01-27
Populist nations fared much worse during Covid outbreak, new research says
This is a news story from CNBC, written by Chloe Taylor. This is a story about a study that came out about how well populist nations fared under COVID-19 compared to other nations around the world. More than 40 countries were included in this study, with the US, UK, and India being considered populist nations at the time that this was conducted. In 2020, the study claims that excess deaths were more than twice as high for populist ran governments. For comparison, the countries that were not considered populist in this study include Canada, Sweden, and Japan. For every 100 COVID related deaths, non-populist countries had an additional 8 deaths. In populist led countries, it was an additional 18 deaths for every 100 deaths. The study attributes this to higher citizen mobility that was allowed in populist nations, leading to more spread of the virus. It also claims that populist governments downplayed the severity of the virus itself, giving people the impression that things were safer than they actually were. -
2020-05-21
“Savior or strongman? El Salvador's millennial president defies courts and Congress on coronavirus response”
Aside from being the death of hundreds of thousands, COVID-19 may also be the impetus for the decline of democracy in El Salvador, one of the smallest countries in Latin America. In an article for CNN, journalist Patrick Oppmann provides a brief summary of how El Salvador’s populist president, Nayib Bukele, is taking advantage of the pandemic to attack the nation’s political institutions and consolidate personal power. Ever since he was elected as a political outsider in 2019, President Nayib Bukele has utilized social media to attack his political opponents and journalists, who he believes are obstacles to his personal agenda. He also marched soldiers into the National Assembly to intimidate lawmakers into signing a bill to increase police and military funding, arousing the fear of those who remembered El Salvador’s history of military dictatorships. The emergence of COVID-19 has given Bukele the opportunity to further attack the nation’s institutions and to consolidate his own power. He placed stringent quarantine measures and deployed military policemen on the streets to catch violators, who would then be sent to quarantine centers. Bukele also used the pandemic to go after gangs such as MS-13, whose members were rounded up and taken to densely packed prisons and stripped naked. This particular measure not only violated human rights, it also harmed efforts to reintegrate gang members, according to a former gang member interviewed by Oppmann. Despite these heavy handed measures, Bukele and his administration maintain high approval ratings. Bukele has leveraged this high approval rating to ignore El Salvador’s Supreme Court and National Assembly. The former ruled that he had no authority to extend lockdown orders, while the former proposed a bill to reopen the nation’s economy ahead of the reopening date scheduled by Bukele. Rather than acceding to their demands, Bukele had instead taken to social media, castigating both of these institutions as unrepresentative and illegitimate. Oppmann ends his article by noting that, as the pandemic continues, there will most likely be more clashes between El Salvador’s young, populist president and the nation’s other institutions.