Monthly Archive: October 2000

The authorities claim that their politics stay the same because they enjoy wide support of the population. However, the survey results, for instance, show us that the Belarusian society is seriously discontent with the course taken by the regime. We should not plainly maintain that the protesting electorate exists. It is made up almost 50% of the population. Therefore, one of the major issues, which faces the democratic forces today is how to make use of this situation,

1. Confidence of Belarusians in state and civil institutes is decreasing
As the results of the analysis show confidence of public leaders in state and public institutes differs greatly from that of the population (see Table 1). If the leaders are more prone to trust independent research centers, non-state mass media and OSCE AMG, the population trust first of all to church, army and independent research centers, the trust index of which is much higher than that of the president, thereby deforming the traditional Slavic triad “God, Tzar and Military Chief.” The leaders trust courts, police and local authorities least of all, whereas the population – political parties, police and local authorities.

After Yugoslav President S. Milosevic was ousted from office some opposition leaders often say that the Yugoslavian scenario has fair chance to be successful in Belarus. How do such aspirations correspond to the reality? What Belarusian voters think about it? The fact that only 30.5% of convinced opponents of A. Lukashenko positively assessed March of Freedom III is especially revealing (see Table 1). Among the vacillators this figure is fourfold lower – 7.7%.

As the last election showed, modern political technologies that are widely adopted in Russia have not come to Belarus yet. Naturally, as we see from Table 1, the candidates mostly used traditional methods of persuasion. And here it turned out that almost a quarter of all the voters faced no campaigning at all! Leaflets are traditionally at the top of the information sources list (57.8%). Only 6.2% of the respondents named personal visiting of candidates as an information source. Though it is widely known that personal contacts are the most efficient method to promote this or that point of view.

The sociological procedures carried out by IISEPS in October were conducted after the first round of the elections, which took place on October 15. Therefore, we could confidently (of course, within the 3% margin of error) talk about its results and possible aftermath.