State responses to COVID-19 have engendered fears of expanding authoritarian rule around the globe. Over the last two years, heightened repression, militarization, and restrictions triggered by the pandemic have led to various types of regimes’ violation of democratic standards, from full and flawed democracies to competitive authoritarian systems and absolute monarchies. The Freedom in the World score dropped by 45 points in 2020, marking the most significant decline in the last fifteen years. This trend has given rise to renewed scholarly interest in democratic backsliding, also known as de-democratization, meaning the gradual decline of democratic norms within democracies. Alarmed by the de-democratization of five regimes globally from 2020 to 2021 and by the occurrence of violations of democratic norms in full democracies like the United States and France, recent research delved into the impact of COVID-19 on democracies.[4] Less attention has been paid to further autocratization in authoritarian systems, even though dictatorships are especially vulnerable to adopting autocratic practices during crises, given their struggles with low legitimacy, overreliance on coercion, and regime monopoly over power. In fact, autocracies comprised 36 of the 57 countries that recorded moderate violations of democratic standards during the pandemic and 30 of the 44 that recorded major violations. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which is home to the largest concentration of dictatorships in the world, this essay builds on data from the Varieties of Democracy’s Pandemic Backsliding Project, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and Freedom House to examine how state response to the pandemic impacts autocratization in authoritarian contexts. It further leverages media analysis of reports of state-sponsored violence during the pandemic to categorize state responses that violate democratic norms and distinguish between measures that have led regimes to further autocratize and those that are merely part of their crisis management. It finds that, as the global health crisis empowered autocratic regimes to take on extraordinary powers, their response exacerbated existing autocratic practices, thereby amplifying authoritarianism. Interestingly, this could be seen across a spectrum of authoritarian states, and it manifested through what this essay qualifies as active and passive backsliding.