Politics and Governance (ISSN: 2183–2463) 2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages 496–508 DOI: 10.17645/pag.v8i4.3424 Article Best in Covid: Populists in the Time of Pandemic Lenka Buštíková 1,* and Pavol Baboš 2 1 School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; E-Mail:
[email protected] 2 Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, 811 01 Bratislava, Slovakia; E-Mail:
[email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 1 July 2020 | Accepted: 1 November 2020 | Published: 17 December 2020 Abstract How do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocratic populists in power during the first wave of the novel coronavirus crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We identify three features of the populist pandemic response. First, populists bypassed established, institutionalized channels of crisis response. Second, they engaged in erratic yet responsive policy making. These two features are ubiquitous to populism. The third feature, specific to technocratic populism, is the politicization of expertise in order to gain legitimacy. Technocratic populists in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia weaponized medical expertise for political purposes. Keywords ANO; Covid-19; Czech Republic; health expertise; nationalism; OL’aNO; pandemic; populism; Slovakia; technocratic populism Issue This article is part of the issue “Varieties of Technocratic Populism around the World” edited by Petra Guasti (Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) and Lenka Buštíková (Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic / Arizona State University, USA). © 2020 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal).