At the end of February, as the Covid-19 crisis developed in Europe, governments began to adopt measures which evolved by March into various sorts of lock-down aiming to impose physical distancing between individuals. In a context in which, after decades of neoliberal policies, underfunding and privatisation, national public health systems lacked the capacity to cope with the surge of demand provoked by the global pandemic, lock-downs were deemed essential.
At the same time as a substantial part of economic activity was suspended, governments pledged to support workers who had to abstain from work and businesses that had to shut, including the announcement of several social policy and temporary tax relief measures. Where adopted, lock-down measures typically included the prohibition of congregations and restriction of non-essential travel, granting enhanced powers to the police to enforce this where needed. The executive authority meanwhile assumed more powers, ostensibly to upgrade health care capacities and deal with the economic consequences mostly via executive decrees instead of proper legislation.
This is as far as the generalisation can go. When one gets into the specifics of each European state, significant divergences emerge not only with respect to the timing, the scope and the details of the measures adopted but also with respect to their focus, their direction and their logic or absence thereof. While for example some, such as the centre-left coalition government in Spain, have brought private hospitals under state control, others, such as the right-wing government in Greece, paid private hospitals premium money to use their facilities. Whereas the centre-left government in Portugal decided to give to all migrants and asylum seekers temporary citizen rights in order to automatically incorporate them into the social security and health care systems, in Bulgaria the army which was given police powers by the conservative government , set up checkpoints outside Roma neighbourhoods to control their movement.
