COVID-19, a crisis also for public liberties

Confinements, health passports … In two years, the crisis of the COVID-19 It unleashed an unprecedented wave of restrictions, which meant a setback in public freedoms difficult to imagine in democratic countries.

“We had progressively got used to a society of free individuals; we are a nation of caring citizens, “French President Emmanuel Macron said in a television interview at the end of 2020. A year later, he assumed the transition to “a surveillance society.”

These words, spoken by the leader of one of the world’s leading democracies, illustrate how the health crisis led to wide restrictions on freedoms being accepted.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many countries have established lockdowns or curfews that forced their citizens to stay at home in a more or less strict way.

In 2021, a new restrictive measure appeared: the health passport, which imposes vaccination or a negative diagnostic test for COVID-19, to be able to access certain spaces such as restaurants or movie theaters. Some countries like France are in the process of hardening it to become a vaccination-only passport.

In other countries, such as Australia, a strategy called “zero COVID” is being carried out which, to prevent the spread of the virus, often leads to strict confinements, as well as important quarantines for infected people.

All these measures are justified from a health point of view. Sweden, which for a long time pursued less drastic policies, had a higher mortality from COVID-19 than the other neighboring Scandinavian countries that were more severe.

Countries with a “zero COVID” strategy managed to considerably limit the number of deaths, even though this policy has shown its limits in the face of the appearance of the most contagious versions of the virus, such as the delta and omicron variants.

At first, these restrictions had broad support from the population, which gradually weakened over time, as shown by the major demonstrations in France and the Netherlands, as well as some electoral results.

In Germany, the liberal FDP party, which at the beginning of the pandemic It was very low in the polls, it obtained a good result in the legislative elections of September 2021 after having defended public freedoms, despite the health crisis.

Contrasts between countries

The consequences of these measures for democracy can be long-lasting, according to various human rights organizations.

The decline in freedoms “runs the risk of continuing when the health crisis calms down, because it will be difficult to reverse the laws and rules imposed,” warned the US NGO Freedom House, which makes a report on the state every year. of democracy by country.

This organization points out that the health crisis accelerated the authoritarian drifts of some countries, such as Sri Lanka. Freedom House claims that the authorities punished any criticism of the official discourse on the pandemic, and also took advantage of health pretexts to attack the Muslim minority.

Although it may give the impression that there has been a general decline in freedom in democratic countries and authoritarian states, nuances are essential. The restrictions have been very different from country to country.

In Europe, “the eastern countries were very strict,” sums up Raul Magni-Berton, a political scientist at the Institute for Political Studies in Grenoble (south-eastern France), to AFP. “Of the western countries, France was the toughest.”

Magni-Berton, along with other researchers, studied the degree of severity of the measures taken by nearly forty countries, to try to explain the differences between them.

To begin with, being more or less strict hardly depends on the ideology of the political party in power. Nor the seriousness of the health situation.

Instead, there are two factors that do generate greater respect for freedoms. First: an uninterrupted democratic past for more than a century, as is the case in the United Kingdom or Switzerland.

And second, restrictions tend to be less severe in countries where political decisions are more difficult to enforce unilaterally.

“The question is with how many people are you forced to negotiate,” sums up the political scientist.

These are, for example, federal countries such as Germany or political systems with high proportionality, where governments are made up of very heterogeneous coalitions, as is the case in the Netherlands, which nevertheless has just imposed very restrictive measures in view of the increase in cases by omicron. .