THE PANDEMIC OF COVID-19 - A CATALYST FOR CHANGES IN THE COUNTRIES OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE.

The pandemic of Covid-19 has been an unprecedented challenge to the majority of countries in the world. This article examines whether COVID-19 has strengthened or weakened the previously chosen path of development in four countries in Central and Eastern Europe - Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, and Moldova. The selected countries represent different transformation paths taken after the collapse of communism and allow for showing various reactions of governments to the Covid- 19 crisis. Therefore, we analyze the pandemic's effect on three major components of the developmental process - political, social, and economic and check whether COVID-19 has caused any changes in these three spheres. Also, we scrutinized the scope of the measures implemented by governments and their impact on their development paths. We found that while in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the liberal democracy model has not been questioned, in Hungary, the earlier tendencies of backsliding from democracy have deepened. In the countries which are in the process of democracy-building - Moldova and Ukraine - the pandemic has not significantly affected the intensity of violating its principles, as they are still weakly established. Thus, the analysis of the first wave of the Covid -19 pandemic showed that it was not a catalyst for the change but tended to deepen and strengthen trends that existed before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]