Covid faded, the politics it fed did not. The populist parties that rode the pandemic dropped the vaccine talk but have all outlasted it.
When Lady Evelyn Beauchamp died in 1980, aged 79, following a series of strokes, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists on hand to declare that the curse of Tutankhamun had struck again. Some 58 years previous, aged just 21, Lady Evelyn, along with her father the Earl of Carnarvon and the archaeologist Howard Carter, had been the first people in modern times to enter the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The idea of a ‘curse’ became popular a few months later when Carnarvon died of pneumonia in Cairo. That he was prone to frequent and severe lung infections did not prevent the curse becoming a popular trope, a feature of innumerable, forgettable books and films to this day.
Such idiocy, then, is nothing new. That does not make any less depressing, however, the realisation that a similar such trope, this time what we might call the curse of the Covid-19 vaccine, may itself enjoy a 50-year run in the public imagination. More than six years on from the first doses of the vaccine being administered (by which stage, according to not a few anti-vaxxers, those of us who did the right thing and protected ourselves, our families, and our communities should all be dead) headlines in more conspiratorial news outlets and darker parts of the internet will still point to the vaccine as a cause of death. Dolly Parton, who died last month, was, some have reportedly claimed, killed by a ‘turbo cancer’ brought on by the Covid-19 vaccine (research into which she partially funded and which she was administered with television cameras present).
Covid-19 was a strange, grim period in recent human history. The confirmed global number of deaths from the pandemic is over 7.1 million, though estimates including excess mortality range significantly higher. The pandemic caused a major global economic downturn (from which it has arguably yet to fully recover), the education of tens of millions of young people was interrupted (accelerating an information and digital divide between communities with different resource levels), while it also reshaped public health and the way the way that we work: many people who began working at home have yet to return, at least full-time, to the office.
It is far too soon to posit with any level of accuracy what the long-term impact of Covid-19 will be, but we do already know that the pandemic acted as an amplifier of pre-existing societal fault lines and tensions. Marginalised populations suffered disproportionately, and many of those people looked (not without reason) to anyone offering easy, clear cut, if highly dubitable answers, often provided by charlatans, chancers, or simply out and out cranks. The pandemic was a launching ramp for such people, who often coagulated around hitherto marginalised political parties offering populist solutions. It is no surprise that populist, extremist parties were the most critical of lockdowns and restrictions, the most vehemently opposed to universal vaccination. What is, perhaps, a surprise, is that these parties, their popularity artificially inflated by the pandemic, did not deflate once the pandemic was over. In many cases, they have gone from strength to strength. Their messaging may no longer be about ‘unfair’ restrictions and the ‘dangers’ of vaccines, but the idea that the state, and by association traditional political parties, cannot be trusted, persists.
Ammunition for populists
This rise of populism, and its rejection of objectivity and rationality, could yet be the darkest legacy of Covid-19. Romania, possibly, offers the clearest case. In September 2020 the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (known by the acronym AUR, which means ‘gold’ in Romanian), founded just a year before, took under one per cent in local elections. Three months later, after an autumn of vigorous, well-targeted anti-mask rallies and anti-vaccination campaigning, it took nine per cent and entered parliament, to the bemusement of pollsters and analysts who had not even bothered to measure its support, considering the party irrelevant. In December 2024 AUR became the second largest party in parliament while last May its leader, George Simion, reached a run-off for the presidency before losing to Nicușor Dan, the mayor of Bucharest.
In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was the loudest parliamentary voice against lockdowns and mandates and a fellow traveller of the Querdenker movement, more than doubled the number of seats it held (to 152) in the federal parliament at February 2025’s election, its best result ever. It is the second largest party in the Bundestag, and this month it won around 44 per cent in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. Austria went one step beyond. Herbert Kickl spent the pandemic addressing anti-vaccine crowds, rubbishing masks and talking up ivermectin (a horse dewormer) as a cure. His Freedom Party (FPÖ) won a national election in September 2024, its first such win since the war. That Austria had briefly imposed the first vaccine mandate in Europe did it no harm at all. Kickl never became chancellor, however, as other parties came together to keep him out, at least for now.
What, then, is to be done? Romania’s answer has been the worst available. With members of its diaspora already voting, in December 2024 the country’s constitutional court cancelled the second round of a presidential election at the very last moment after Călin Georgescu, a pro-Russian outsider, won the first round following a viral TikTok campaign. The court might have had grounds to do so (although to this day few of the details, despite repeated promises, have been made public), but it handed Simion and AUR (who backed Georgescu) ammunition to support their claims that ‘the system’ is rigged and would cheat rather than lose. Whatever it is that needs to be done, cancelling elections and banning candidates is not the way forward.
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