All this, in conscious and subconscious ways, determined how individuals voted in local and national elections, over the next few years. It determined how politicians and policymakers viewed their societies and its fundamental challenges. And it determined how countries interacted with each other.

Therefore, to understand how the pandemic changed politics, it may be useful to adopt a two-level analytical framework: the national, and the bilateral / multilateral.

***

At the national level, the continued influence of the pandemic on election outcomes was most visible, perhaps, in the US polls.

Covid-19 led to over a million deaths in the United States. It traumatised society. While many responded by following scientific advice, others responded by holding science and medicine responsible and resisting common-sense measures ranging from masking to isolation and the vaccines themselves.

In an already fiercely individualistic society traditionally suspicious of curbs on autonomy, frustration and fear were expressed as anger, directed at government authorities, medical authorities, school boards, scientists and researchers.

Amid economic distress, two successive administrations tried to use a fiscal stimulus to put money in people’s hands and boost spending. This had the unintended consequence of being inflationary beyond expectations. Which, in turn, led to more popular anger.

Ironically, President Donald Trump, who presided over one of the worst policy responses to the pandemic in the developed world, was able to leverage both the illiterate anger against medical establishment, and the more genuine grievances against the government over inflation, and turn these into electoral assets.

In the process, he turned his back on his one true accomplishment: that of speeding up vaccine development. The political trade-off would appear to have worked for him. Somehow, he positioned himself as the face against the response to Covid-19, rather than the face of the response to it. This was among the factors that helped him win a second term in November.

***

Covid-19 has influenced politics in other societies too, if in less obvious ways.

Take India. Voters here did not necessarily hold the government responsible for policy failures, even during the devastating second wave. But they did hold the government responsible for the K-shaped recovery (as corporate profits rose and the more affluent did well, while the lower-middle-class and poor saw a further dip in incomes), the continued economic distress in the lower rungs, and the failure to create enough jobs, all of which likely helped determine the outcome of the 2024 general election.

Meanwhile, across South Asia, in countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there has been growing political instability, unrest, and street protests. Across Europe, there has been the rise of more extreme formations on both the Right and the Left.

All this is due as much to the failures of the liberal and democratic Centre as to the rise in cultural and economic anxieties, which were then aggravated by the pandemic.

***

In a sense, once the pandemic hit, some of this was inevitable.

Political systems, in both the developed and developing world, had to respond to the tremendous pressure for better healthcare, more resilient supply chains, quicker economic recovery and growth, and greater stability and order. But these are all structural issues that do not lend themselves to easy solutions.

So, even as political systems attempted to solve the longer-term issues, for reasons of either ideology or survival, they also became more nationalistic, less tolerant of traditional constitutional and democratic restraints, actively resistant to external influences, more prickly, more angry.

All this has had an impact on the interlinked processes of bilateral state-to-state relations and multilateralism.

The pandemic served as a stark reminder, if one was needed, that the world is fundamentally anarchic and every state must fend for itself.

As multilateral institutions such as the United Nations faltered, this suited the most powerful actors in the system. Trump’s US, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China could engage in unilateral action without worrying about the restraining influence of international norms or bodies.

Five years after the pandemic, there is little doubt that multilateral institutions have grown steadily weaker.

This has led to the rise of the transactional bilateral relationship. Realists have always argued that states are the fundamental units of the international system, and they are driven by the search for security and prosperity. They engage in fairly predictable behaviour and deploy a set of strategies, from balancing to bandwagoning to hedging, when confronted with external threats.

But even the realists likely couldn’t have predicted how the pandemic would create an international system in which the riskiest geopolitical moves, ones that would once have been considered irrational adventurism, would become the norm (think of what’s happening in the US, West Asia, Europe) And they couldn’t have imagined that such gambles would, at least in the short term, even appear to pay dividends.

The pandemic was a moment of danger that has had the effect of creating incentives for states to engage in more dangerous behaviour with limited checks. In a world of enduring conflicts and the rolling fallouts of the climate crisis, that is perhaps the most perilous political legacy of Covid-19.

(prashant.jha1@htlive.com)