How to think the political fall-out of the coronavirus crisis? In the summer number of Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama—having sketched a future of protracted crisis—offered an alternative picture: the pandemic had exposed the demagogy and incompetence of populists and taught the benefits of professionalism and expertise. Bolsonaro was now floundering, while Trump had failed to lead. Merkel, by contrast, had done impressively well. covid-19 may ‘lance the boil of populism’, Fukuyama told the bbc, because ‘there’s a correlation between being a populist and doing badly.’ The argument was picked up by Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times, under the header, ‘Coronavirus could kill off populism’. Trump and Bolsonaro had demonstrated their inability to face reality, whereas Merkel had had an excellent crisis, Rachman thought. All in all, ‘liberals have good cause to hope’. The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor joined the chorus: Merkel, the ‘consummate anti-populist’, had emerged as a political heroine, whereas Trump and Bolsonaro had led the Western hemisphere’s worst-hit nations. Under their rule, ‘confirmed cases soared, while public approval of the presidents plummeted.’
Sage pundits hedge their bets, and these were no exception. But in a global perspective, do their claims stand up? Empirically, not as such. Figures for covid-19 are generally unreliable and rarely comparable. Gross numbers merely single out the largest of the hard-hit countries. The more meaningful metric is per capita deaths, and here the us and Brazil are by no means the worst affected. Peru—governed by the centre right—has a higher mortality rate than both of them, at 1,028 deaths per million. Next come liberal-led Belgium (884) and Bolivia (721) under Áñez, a right-winger from the so-called Democrat Social Movement. All three have higher per capita death rates than Bolsonaro’s Brazil (707), while Chile (698) under right-wing plutocrat Piñera, psoe-led Spain (696) and Ecuador (687) under centre-left Moreno have all done worse than Trump’s America (645) and Tory Britain (638).footnote1
Conceptually, too, the move from ideological stance to epidemiological competence to (hoped-for) electoral outcome—‘being a populist and doing badly’—elides the complex causes of covid-19’s differential impact. The virus is playing out across vertiginously unequal social landscapes, set within a hierarchical inter-state system, with huge national variations in medical, social and administrative resources and with general public health striated by accumulated privilege, built up over generations. Fukuyama, with his formation in the historicizing tradition of Hegel, at least nods to some of this. When it comes to framing questions about politics and the pandemic, the radical wing of that tradition, running forward from Hegel through Marx and Gramsci to the Annales researchers and beyond,footnote2 offers some finely calibrated conceptual tools with which to begin. Freely adapting their notions of the event, the conjuncture and the longue durée may allow us to consider the interactions between the exogenous ‘event’ of the pandemic, the national and inter-state political conjunctures on which it impinges, and the underlying competitive dynamics of the world capitalist economy. The character of the conjuncture, and the forces in play, will help to determine the reception and impact of the event, while the shock of the event itself—and the responses to it—may also deter, defer, deflect or amplify and accelerate existing trends.
The hope would be that such a reading could provide a more nuanced view of covid-19’s political fall-out than Fukuyama’s stark alternatives of chaos or liberal competence. Thinking historically about the impact of the pandemic also means thinking reflexively about our own temporal position within it. The frontline countries grappling with the onset of the virus in early spring—China, Italy, Iran—knew very little of what they were up against. By late summer 2020, the parameters were much clearer. But the political fall-out of 2021 and beyond will be shaped above all by the looming world-debt crisis, of which we have only a general intimation. So the notes below are strictly provisional, markers from the present as we are swept forwards on history’s stream.
Take Peru: why has it fared so badly? Though one of the richer Andean countries, it has had one of the lowest levels of social spending. The economy, dominated by foreign mining giants, gouging copper, gold, zinc and hydrocarbons from the mountains and the Amazonian jungle, has been depressed by the sector’s downturn since 2014, correlated with China’s slowing growth. The Peruvian fishing industry has been decimated by climate change. Presiding over all this is a kleptocratic elite that saw off the last serious attempt at reform in the 1970s. Peru has one of the highest proportions of informal workers in Latin America, some 80 per cent of the labour force, many scraping a living on the streets of Lima, and one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the region. The current president, Martín Vizcarra, ex-governor of a sparsely populated mining state, was recruited as vice president in 2016 by one of the country’s old-school politicians, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. With a background at Oxford, Princeton, World Bank, Wall Street, private equity—a professional, in Fukuyama’s terms—earlier accused of diverting funds to an American oil company, Kuczynski was caught up, along with the apex-corrupt Fujimori family, in the Odebrecht scandal and forced to resign in 2018, catapulting Vizcarra into the Presidential Palace. When his attempt to push through an anti-corruption law was blocked by the Fujimori-dominated Congress, Vizcarra called a legislative election which in January 2020 produced another hostile, deeply fragmented Congress.
Peru’s response to covid-19 was thus set against a backdrop of elite infighting. Vizcarra’s instinct was to follow the diktats of international institutions. Returning from Wuhan in late February, Bruce Aylward, a top Canadian official at the who, had advised the rest of the world to ‘learn from China’, where strict lockdown measures were successfully checking transmission.footnote3 On 15 March, Vizcarra imposed Latin America’s first lockdown: a mandatory general quarantine, policed by the security forces, with people allowed to leave their homes only for essential business; schools were shut, borders closed, cities under nightly curfew. In line with imf orthodoxy, Peru’s social-security framework was skeletal. Chaotic scenes ensued, with millions in Lima denied the chance to work, hungry and running out of cash. Many set out for their hometowns in the mountains, only to be blocked by riot police, tear-gassed and forced back into the slums. The country’s ombudsman reported over 300 protests between March and May 2020, as covid cases surged.
Under pressure, the Vizcarra government announced a cash-transfer programme for poor families. But Peru’s database of low-income households was one of the scantiest in the region, covering fewer than a fifth of the country’s children.footnote4 When the government opened a website to allow Peruvians to self-register for assistance, it crashed under the weight of 16 million applications. It was not until May that a broader cash-transfer programme got under way, though the long queues to collect cash handouts then became infection hotspots themselves. Peru thus saw a double wave of cases, first in May and then a larger surge in August, while deaths climbed steadily throughout the summer. Meanwhile, as global uncertainty drove up the world price of gold and silver, the mining conglomerates, which had all but ignored the lockdown, powered ahead with production. The mines themselves became covid vectors, leading to armed clashes between security guards and indigenous villagers starved of food and medicine. By this stage, cemeteries were overflowing, hospitals on the brink of collapse and hundreds of irreplaceable medical workers had died.