Determinants of the Rally-Round-The Flag Effect: the cases of Trump, Orbán and Bolsonaro amid the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 virus pandemic has caused a tormenting problem for democracies around the planet. Some governments, relying on the Rally-round-the-Flag Effect, took advantage of the moment of exceptionality to increase their own executive powers, making them even more exorbitant, while others took a denialist stance in relation to the global threat posed by the virus. missing the opportunity to present themselves as protectors of the population and thus forge some kind of national unity. The objective of the article is to analyze how three relevant and authoritarian political leaders adopted different strategies to confront the pandemic, embracing or disregarding the Rally-round-the-Flag Effect, as well as the political consequences of such decisions. Our hypothesis is that the leaders scrutinized at work who ignored the Rally-round-the-Flag Effect strategy were unsuccessful in combating the pandemic, paying a high political price for this, which did not happen to those who adopted it. In this sense, the cases of the Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán governments will be critically examined in light of the proposed theme. The method used consists of comparing the three models of governance in the fight against the pandemic with the literature in political science, especially that which deals with the Rally-round-the-Flag Effect and the so-called illiberal democracies considering the authoritarian profile of the aforementioned leaders. The main conclusion shows that Trump and Bolsonaro's negotiating strategy resulted in failure due to the high number of deaths resulting from the pandemic and frustrated their eventual plans for democratic erosion of institutions, while Orbán, that adopted the posture of protector of the population under the mantle of the Rally Effect-round-the-Flag, further expanded its executive powers.