The fifth parliamentary elections in Belarus will take place next Sunday. According to the existing majoritarian system, 110 MPs will be elected from the corresponding number of districts to the lower house of Parliament. According to data provided by the Central Election Commission, 494 candidates are going to run for Parliament, 265 of them are party members. And all of them can be referred to as opposition.
Let us remind that all the previous elections, starting from 1995, were not recognized by Europe because of falsification, and even persecutions of opposition in some cases. The government is determined to have these elections legitimized. Rosbalt informs that “nonpartisan president Aleksandr Lukashenka brought forward public association Belaya Rus to participate in the elections for the first time. This organization is an analog to Yedinaya Rossia [United Russia]. Most of its members were forced to join the association, but nevertheless, it now numbers 110,000 people and appears to be rather powerful.”
It should also be said that these elections are the first ones that are going to be held in accordance with the amended election legislation. Some of the amendments simplified the procedure of nomination and registration of candidates, which directly affected number of candidates from the parties. There are more than 40 percent of them. But there is still an unsolved problem: the “closedness” on many stages of the elections, like verification of signatures required for the nomination of candidates, or votes counting, the latter has not even been specified in Belarusian legislation yet.
Lukashenka treated his opponents in the most lenient way this time: he let them carry out the pre-election campaign and gave them some space in the state mass media. The experts explain that Lukashenka needs the presence of minimal number of oppositionists in the parliament in order to show the innovative approach to this campaign and his positive attitude towards democracy. On the other hand, an insignificant number of oppositionists can hardly affect the state politics. However, it might change Europe’s opinion and soften the economic sanctions it imposed on Belarus.
“We are ready to use foreign practices, but we will not blindly copy them. Belarusians are the followers of evolutionary and progressive development, but not sudden changes and revolutions,” Lukashenka said. But what practices could he talk about, if he simply discards them, let alone trying to comprehend them.
Nevertheless, the president called upon local authorities to provide the candidates with freedom of campaigning “on terms as good as the ones that were present during the presidential elections in 2010.” When Lukashenka spoke about foreign observers, he said: “If anyone wants to watch the election process in Belarus, we must grant this right to them.”
The sociological service “Baltic – Gallop” conducted a poll in February. Its results are very interesting. According to the collected data, almost everyone out of one thousand respondents could not name three Belarusian MPs. And head of parliament, the second or third person in the country’s political hierarchy, is known by less than 4 percent of interviewed people. And according to the opposition, this directly suggests that the previous elections were forged.
And the actions of law enforcement agencies contrast sharply with Lukashenka’s words. One of actions organized by the youth organization “Speak the Truth!” was broken up. Participants and journalists were beaten up. “I doubt that Lukashenka wants Europe to recognize these elections,” deputy chairman of the “Vesna” Human Rights Center Valentin Stefanovich told The Day. “It seems that the government is now used to the evaluations and recommendations that have been presented by the OSCE after each elections.”
Head of the Central Election Commission Lidia Yermoshina accused Europe of biased attitude towards Belarusian elections in her interview to Sovetskaya Belorussiya. In particular, she was outraged by the number of foreign observers present during the elections: “A mission of 15 observers goes to Germany, a country with the population of 80 million people. And Belarus with its 9 million receives more than 700 observers.” Probably, the OSCE has no concerns regarding elections in Germany.
“In Belarus, the election process is a mere imitation of a real one,” Minsk political analyst Valeriy KARBALEVICH told The Day. “Neither government, nor Western observers are interested in elections, result of which is known in advance. But Belarusian government needs positive feedback from the European Union. Even Belarusian parliament de facto is a decoration, with no real influence on political life of the country.”
However, Belarusian opposition can change the decorations in Lukashenka’s political theater a bit. If the elections are boycotted by the opposition, they might not be granted the legitimization, which is so desired by the president. The oppositionists have separated into three parts. The first one thinks that they need to fully participate in the elections. The second part has initially stated about them boycotting against the elections. And the third one decided to participate in the pre-election campaign, but remove their candidates just before the elections day, thus boycotting the voting.
Anatoly Lebedko, head of the United Civil Party of Belarus (UCP), can be referred to as the member of the third group. Recently he spoke at the press conference, which was held jointly with another opposition group, Belarusian People’s Front. He announced the removal of the UCP candidates and further boycotting of the elections.
“We have neither elections, nor MPs, nor a parliament. And that was the reason why the UCP decided not to play by the government’s rules anymore, and offer the citizens its scenario and campaign instead: ‘For fair elections without Lukashenka!” noted Lebedko in his commentary to The Day. “Our current president is more than a certain persona, he now symbolizes the whole system, including the election system.”
During the pre-elections campaign, the UCP laid down three conditions of its participation in the election process: release of 16 political prisoners, inclusion of oppositionists to polling station commissions, and either abolition or strict regulation of early voting. The latter is one of the main sources of falsification: about 30 percent of voters are forced to vote early, and that is where total votes manipulation takes place. The government did not execute any of those demands. “Though we still completed the process of registration of candidates, and nominated more of them than any other opposition group: 57 speakers, and 38 of them passed registration to 110 election districts,” Lebedko added.
According to the oppositionist, this campaign is known for a remarkably high level of censorship. Overall 34 speeches of the UCP candidates were not allowed to go on the air. “This is related to the fact that the government blocked our following message to voters: Aleksandr Lukashenka and the system created by him can only lead into a dead-end! The only possible way out of it is to hold fair and free elections. If this is not happening, there would be no changes and development. The first step to fair elections is boycotting of the unfair ones,” head of the UCP said.
And another famous oppositionist, leader of Za Svobodu [For Freedom] movement Aleksandr Milinkevich was not even registered as a candidate. “He was rejected because according to the district election commission’s conclusion, more than 15 percent of signatures collected for his registration were invalid,” informed the movement’s press service. But according to the rumors, he was not allowed to participate in the campaign, because he initially announced his desire to participate in the election process from the very beginning to the end.
Stefanovich thinks that the matter of attendance on the election day is a painful one. “Considering the fact that some opposition parties announced they are boycotting the elections, some of them registered candidates only to appeal to voters with a request to boycott the elections too. From the government’s reaction we can see that they are greatly displeased by that,” Stefanovich said in his commentary to The Day.
“During every elections, we watch how the administrative resource is exploited. Certain categories of voters, like students, military personnel, workers of state enterprises, especially those in small towns, are manipulated or forced to vote for government. This is what we are going to pay special attention to while observing the attendance rates, and then compare those numbers to the ones provided by the Central Election Commission.”
Stefanovich admitted that he would boycott the elections. However, he thinks that boycotting has its drawbacks too. “One of the parties has systematically been boycotting all the elections for a long time. As a result, no one knows about its existence, it disappeared completely from Belarusian politics,” he said.
When talking about the opposition forces’ tactics during these elections, Karbalevich notes: “The first shortcoming of the opposition is that it failed to agree upon a single common tactic. The second one is that it could not build a long-term winning strategy (at least for the 2015 presidential elections) during this campaign.”
It is hard to talk about quality political combat in a country with no public politics and competition whatsoever. That is why, according to Stefanovich, it is not easy to talk about the appearance of new opposition parties and leaders. “An inverse process is actually happening right now, nobody wants to engage into opposition politics these days, since it brings nothing but trouble,” he said.
