Elections in Lithuania: what to expect from the “capricious grandmother”?
The results of the first round of the presidential elections in Lithuania, as well as the outcome of the election campaign itself, are not of fundamental importance not only for Russia, but also for Belarus. This is explained by the fact that the political heir to the course of Dalia Grybauskaite, the representative of the conservative Fatherland Union - Christian Democrats party Ingrida Simonyte and the “independent candidate” Gitanas Nausėda, who, however, is also considered close to the conservatives, entered the second round of the presidential election.
This means that official Vilnius will maintain its previous course aimed at increasing tension in the region under the guise of fighting the “Russian threat” and the Belarusian nuclear power plant project.
Elections without choice.
It should be noted that de facto in Lithuania a situation of elections without choice has developed, characteristic of Western “democracy,” when the electoral process itself is quite transparent, there is the appearance of competition, but there is practically no real difference between the politicians vying for power. That is, in this case, democratic procedures are in fact only a screen behind which the form, but not the content, changes.
For Lithuanian society, this means continuing to exist in a “besieged fortress” regime, when economic failures, growing social inequality, phenomenal depopulation and completely unreasonable military expenses for a small country will be compensated by the elite spy mania and fables about "little green men". The level of hysteria in the Lithuanian establishment, for example, is evidenced by the fact that members of parliament and experts from government analytical structures are seriously discussing the possibility of banning the Russian cartoon “Masha and the Bears,” in which some figures managed to see “a hybrid weapon of the Kremlin.”
In relations with Belarus, Lithuania has a similar picture, when an inadequate perception of reality does not allow politicians not only to turn off the wrongly chosen road, but even to simply stop and think. In fact, the Lithuanian elite drove itself into a trap with the topic of opposition to the Belarusian nuclear power plant, when it first declared its intention to stop construction, and then cut off the path to retreat, declaring the Belarusian nuclear power plant a “threat to national security.”
At the same time, Lithuania’s confrontational position has not affected the development of the Belarusian nuclear program at all, and it is expected that the first power unit of the Belarusian NPP will be put into operation in 2019, and the second in 2020. This means that the nuclear power plant in Ostrovets will not become a “threat”, but a reality for the new President of Lithuania, and Vilnius simply does not have any plans to deal with this situation. It would not be amiss to remember that the next meeting between the leadership of the Rosatom campaign and the Belarusian Government took place on May 11, 2019 and, as far as is known, Lithuanian issues were not discussed at all at these negotiations.
Thus, by “taking a principled position,” the Lithuanian leadership achieved nothing except that they stopped paying any attention to Vilnius at all, while at the initial stage Lithuania was even offered joint participation in the operation of the station.
“Take it with you so you don’t fall when walking.”
Lithuania's main mistake was to overestimate its own importance in the international arena, as well as insufficient understanding of the specifics of relations between Belarus and the European Union. Vilnius’s strategy in countering the BelNPP, which conservatives called “Russian atomic bomb on the border,” was the idea of moving the discussion of the project from the plane of bilateral relations with Minsk and negotiations of energy experts to the supranational level in the focus of the geopolitical confrontation between the West and Russia. However, the collective West did not appreciate the idea of Lithuanian diplomacy and, as a result, not only Europeans, but even Americans did not take the stories about the “atomic bomb” seriously. The position of neighboring Latvia, whose ruling circles have declared their readiness to cooperate with Minsk in the field of energy, has become a kind of “knife in the back” for Lithuanian conservatives.
At the same time, it must be recognized that Lithuania’s blocking actions regarding the signing of the Framework Agreement between Belarus and the EU and the interim agreement on partnership priorities are indeed quite unpleasant for official Minsk. However, here too, the Lithuanian authorities should have understood that the Belarusian state has been interacting with the EU for more than 25 years even without these agreements, so such blackmail was unlikely to have a chance of success.
In the future, it is obvious that Minsk will continue to ignore Lithuania’s antics, gradually accustoming Lithuanian politicians to the fact that the Belarusian nuclear power plant exists, operates and there is no escape from it, despite any speeches from Vilnius. In the Republic of Belarus, it is generally accepted that in the future, a gradual clarification of the consciousness of Lithuanian leaders will lead to some normalization of relations, but in the next 2-3 years, nervousness will most likely continue.
However, this does not particularly worry anyone, because recently Belarus has learned to treat the Lithuanian state as an elderly capricious grandmother, who sometimes irritates with her actions, but cannot cause real harm and essentially deserves sympathy. Therefore, the only correct course of action in relation to Vilnius is to continue the implementation of existing mutually beneficial projects and completely ignore all sorts of hysterical statements about the Belarusian nuclear power plant, military exercises between Belarus and Russia, “human rights”, etc.
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