Germany's Corona Crisis: The Authoritarian Turn in Public Policy and the Rise of the Biosecurity State (2020-2022)

Abstract

This article examines Corona crisis policies in Germany between January 2020 and March 2022. During this period, Corona crisis management can be analytically disaggregated into four different time periods. Each stage of policy-making included steadily growing authoritarianism combined with unclear objectives and erratic communication. Throughout the entire period, policy-making was driven by a closed community of advisors linked to government-financed research institutes, while other groups of experts were excluded from deliberation and decision-making. The almost single-minded emphasis on the rapid rollout of mRNA 'vaccines', i.e. efforts to 'solve' the crisis by way of pharmaceutical intervention, results currently in the imposition of a new form of authoritarian statehood, namely a 'biosecurity state'. The three substantial chapters in this paper (II-IV) will discuss, in turn, how actors, ideas, and institutions affected German government policies since the start of the Corona crisis. It is argued that Germany's closed style of policy-making under crisis conditions severely undermines the norms and values of liberal democracy.