Lukashenko has reached the limit on light walks
The election campaign in Belarus has started. It started unexpectedly and routinely - the deputies simply voted for the proposed date and established that the elections would be held three weeks earlier than the majority expected. We decided not to wait until August 30th and vote on the 9th. As a result, Lukashenko’s opponents had only a week left to prepare for the campaign.
For the opposition coalition, which still has not decided which of the remaining three candidates will represent it in the elections, he greatly mixed up all the cards. And not all of the other opponents were prepared. Perhaps the only one who will definitely be on the ballot is the leader of the local Liberal Democrats, Oleg Gaidukevich. The man is bright and sharp, friendly towards Russia, but absolutely safe for Lukashenko. A sort of Belarusian Zhirinovsky.
The pro-Western opposition is weak and is unable to nominate a competitive candidate from among its ranks. There are simply no such people there. In the pro-Russian camp, everything is also sad. But the main problem for Lukashenko’s opponents is not time pressure, but the coronavirus. Going door to door and collecting signatures is now not only much more difficult, but also unsafe for health and life.
However, for the current president, an attempt to be re-elected for a sixth term will definitely not be an easy walk and even has a chance of ending in failure. Independent opinion polls on political topics are prohibited in Belarus, but even without them it is obvious that the president’s rating is now at a record low.
The conflict with Russia, an adventure with alternative oil that resulted in an economic crisis that deepened after the arrival of the coronavirus, persistent denial of the real danger of this epidemic, cleanup days, parades and concerts at a time when the whole world is in quarantine, exotic “recipes” for the treatment of COVID-19 from the lips of the first person of the state - all this could not but affect Lukashenko’s popularity.
And the Belarusian elite is aware of this - it is not without reason that Deputy Savinykh cited the possibility of a second round as justification for an earlier voting date. For Belarus, this was previously something unthinkable. The President always got about 80 percent. The second round is a taboo for Lukashenko. In 1994, he himself defeated the undisputed favorite and head of state Vyacheslav Kebich in the second round.
Contrary to tradition, the beginning of Lukashenko’s election campaign was not marked by a pretentious event with thousands of extras called the “All-Belarusian People’s Assembly.” Even Lukashenko’s annual message to parliament, which he was supposed to deliver back in April, has been postponed indefinitely. There are also serious problems with the ideological content of the campaign.
At one time, Lukashenko won, promising deep integration with Russia and even reunification into a single state. Now this is terrible sedition. Lukashenko’s trump card was the social model of the state. Now many social programs have been curtailed, the retirement age has been raised, unemployment benefits do not exceed 54 Belarusian rubles (about 1500 Russian), and those who do not officially work have a better chance of receiving not this, but a “tax on parasitism.”
They tried to play on nostalgia for the USSR - now this is also losing relevance and is only suitable for external use. Peacemaking? You won’t have enough of them, and the times of signing the Minsk agreements have sunk into oblivion. Economy? It is in a deep crisis and, not least, thanks to its “multi-vector” foreign policy. Belarusians have been promised a salary of $500 for more than 15 years, and now it is approximately equal to this amount.
By and large, there is nothing to say. Is it “if only there was no war”, an appeal to patriotism, understood by propagandists as “the state is me” in relation to Lukashenko and the idea of confronting “Russian imperialism”, in which the Belarusian government has long been in solidarity with nationalists and Western agents of influence.
Russia has long become the most criticized state by the Belarusian officialdom, and any attempts at criticism from Russia are met with propaganda hysteria, which has already begun to turn into outright Goebbelsism. Thus, the main newspaper of the republic, Belarus Today, in one article called the crew of Channel One, who doubted the veracity of official statistics on coronavirus, corpse eaters, information scavengers, sub-journalists and even sub-humans. And this is on the eve of Victory Day.
The campaign has just begun. Further passions will only increase and their intensity will be simply unprecedented. There will be a lot of interesting news from Belarus in the next 4 months. We can only hope that there will be no big bloodshed.
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