As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul’s approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This “pandemic-leftist” discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government’s relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one’s country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies.

中文翻译：

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大流行的民族主义在韩国。

与世界大部分地区一样，新冠病毒大流行在 2020 年主导了韩国政治。与其他国家相比，首尔的做法具有高度的民族主义和政治色彩，因为执政党称赞其应对大流行病是全球标准，并将其与更大的，左翼民族主义议程。这种“大流行左派”言论在 4 月 15 日中期选举期间达到顶峰，但随着国内外挫折的出现，次月平息。首先，为了使感染曲线变平而进行的民族主义竞赛鼓励政府侵犯受感染患者的公民自由，并鼓励社会对他们进行污名化。其他国家包含 Covid-19，没有此类侵犯权利和污名。其次，批评者将政府在应对大流行病方面的相对成功与其在经济和外交政策方面的普遍失败区分开来。与其要求其他国家向自己的国家学习，不如学习其他国家的经验，不断改进自己的政策。