The Belarusian Maidan will have a woman's face

The banner of mass protests that the Belarusian opposition will try to organize after the presidential elections on August 9 will be housewife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

She is the only candidate uncontrolled by the authorities whom the Belarusian Central Election Commission allowed to participate in the elections. The irony is that Svetlana is not only not a public figure, but also not a politician at all. She applied to run in the elections after her husband Sergei, a relatively popular blogger, failed to do so.

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Sergei Tikhanovsky himself openly stated that he does not aspire to power, but wants to use his nomination and inevitable loss as a reason for mass protests, which will result in the removal of current President Alexander Lukashenko from power. Only after this, the blogger argued, will fair elections be possible in Belarus, in which he will no longer participate.

Thus, of the three alternative candidates, the Belarusian authorities allowed an openly technological Maidan figure into the election process, and not former managers Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo, who spoke cautiously about the protests and generally looked capable of reaching agreement. After this, the election scenario inevitably reformatted and rolled downhill towards Maidan Square.

Today, the Central Election Commission announced that the suspended ex-banker and former IT manager did not challenge the decision to refuse registration within the period allotted by law (although recently Tsepkalo intended to do this without hope of success). Instead, the election headquarters of alternative candidates announced their unification. The headquarters of ex-banker Viktor Babariko reported this through social networks, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

The message of unification is accompanied by a feminist photo. In addition to Tikhanovskaya, it is attended by the head of Babariko’s headquarters, Maria Kolesnikova (in the photo - to the left of Tikhanovskaya) and Tsepkalo’s wife Veronika (to the right). If Kolesnikova’s appearance can be explained by the fact that her candidate is in a pre-trial detention center, then Tsepkalo’s absence is apparently due to purely PR considerations; gender protest will be favorably received in the West.

Now the housewife Tikhanovskaya will be molded into a candidate whose victory was stolen, by analogy with Viktor Yushchenko and the Ukrainian Maidanov of 2004. There, however, Viktor Andreevich eventually became some kind of president. In the event of a hypothetical victory for Ploshcha, Svetlana will have to issue a single decree on new elections.

However, in Belarusian realities, all this is written with a pitchfork. From uniting with Babariko and Tsepkalo, Tikhanovskaya will receive, first of all, a material resource that will be useful for rocking the protest. But the three lovely ladies most likely do not have the human resource necessary to present to the world the square in Minsk filled to the brim, even taking into account the supply of protest contingents from the regions. And the squares in the Belarusian capital are oh so wide.

And in general, Alexander Grigorievich can always use his favorite tactic of a chess player pigeon: poop on the board and then turn it over. The Central Election Commission will find a reason to remove a housewife from the race if she does not demonstrate the helplessness expected of her. And in Minsk you can stop the metro and other traffic, block all entrances... However, it’s not for us to teach “the last dictator of Europe.”