The International Health Security and National Parliamentary Election: The COVID-19 Elections in Southeast Europe and their Outcomes

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-046-6_70How to use a DOI?

Keywords

health security; parliamentary elections; Southeast Europe; Serbia; Croatia; North Macedonia; Montenegro; 2020; Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In many respects, the year 2020 is unique in human history. The global crisis caused by the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus put almost every country on the planet in an unimaginable situation of combating the pandemic and reasonable attempts to preserve the entrenched models of living and working. This also applies to holding elections in democratic political systems whose terms are usually predetermined by constitutional norms. A democratic multi-party election – viewed as an act of free and fair decision-making by voters about who is to lead certain bodies of government and take certain positions of power – presupposes, overall, usual election circumstances, especially in terms of health and life safety of the participating voters and candidates. South Korea was the first country in the world to hold a parliamentary election amid the first wave of the coronavirus spread in April 2020, whereas in Europe, the four successor states of the former Yugoslavia did so. Serbia held its parliamentary election after an initial postponement in June, Croatia and North Macedonia in July, and Montenegro in August 2020. Held in unprecedented epidemiological conditions, the parliamentary election in each of these states amounted to a test of voters’ attitude toward the respective government heading the state during the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the most-similar method of comparative analysis, this paper defines the term ‘pandemic election’ and analyses whether coping with the current crisis based on the election results benefited the current government or the opposition and why. When human health is at risk, is democracy at risk as well? Specifically, did the Covid-19 pandemic impinge on the process of parliamentary elections and their results? If it is the case, how did it affect them? Who won these elections: the parties in power faced with the crises amid the pandemic or the opposition parties that criticized their respective governments for their actions.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Boško Picula
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/05/02
TI  - The International Health Security and National Parliamentary Election: The COVID-19 Elections in Southeast Europe and their Outcomes
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd Universitas Lampung International Conference on Social Sciences (ULICoSS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 716
EP  - 730
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-046-6_70
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-046-6_70
ID  - Picula2023
ER  -