Monthly Archive: March 2003

ENTERPRISE’S ELECTORATE

Results of the nation public opinion poll make it possible to distinguish the citizens who are well-disposed to the private enterprise and support it. In other words, the citizens who can be referred to as enterprise’s electorate. In this regards, we examine the respondents who are in the positive towards entrepreneur strikes that took place in March of 2003 (“supporters” – 23.9%) and those respondents, equal in number, who spoke in the negative or were indifferent (“non-supporters” – 20.6%). Yet, in our opinion, it is more interesting to compare enterprise supporters and opponents, i.e. those who spoke in the negative on entrepreneur strikes (“opponents” – 5.4%).

ENTREPRENEURS AND POLITICAL PROCESS

A. Lukashenko simply cannot love entrepreneurs. Many people certainly remember his historical passage about “lousy fleas”. Of course, he has all grounds to dislike them. And not simply because they don’t give him reciprocity. Entrepreneurs are not pensioners! They are mainly the men (63.5%) aged 25-50 (78.3%) who has secondary vocational or higher education (95.9%) and live, first of all, in Minsk (31.5%) or other large cities (38.7%).

MOST BELARUSIANS ARE DISSATISFIED WITH THE PROCESS OF DEMOCRATIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS OBSERVANCE

No other domestic issue in Belarus causes such sharp disputes (of international remedial organizations and the West in general, on the one hand, and the Belarusian authorities, on the other hand) like observation of democratic principles and human rights in Belarus. The general stand of the West is very simple: Belarus is a non-democratic country with human rights being steadily and severely violated. As a rule, the authorities take painfully this kind of accusations, generally responding according to the principle “You’re a fool yourself” – telling the Belarusians about misery of Polish farmers,

PARTIES AND ELECTORATE: IN SEARCH OF RECIPROCITY

More and more people in this country and abroad ask themselves the question: Why unprecedented fall of A. Lukashenko’s rating (by 20% – for a year and a half after the election of 2001) is not attended by the growth of democratic parties and their leaders’ rating? Why the well-known in sociology “principle of manometer” doesn’t work in the Belarusian politics? Most of the Belarusians are nowadays ready to changes: 63.4% respondents believe the situation in the country evolves in the wrong direction (“in the right direction” – 21.3%) and 64.1% claim “another candidate should take the post of the president” (“elect Lukashenko a new” – only 23.2%). The opposition should reasonably become the initiator of the changes, for it has been standing for changes for a long time already.

CAN ONE TRUST THE SOCIOLOGISTS? (METHOD OF SAMPLING IN SOCIOLOGICAL SURVEYS)

There have been many debates upon the results of sociological surveys lately, especially upon those handling socially topical problems like rating of the president or opposition parties, attitude towards the integration with Russia or EU, etc.

THE BELARUSIANS ARE MOSTLY CONCERNED OVER ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

As the survey findings show, the Belarusians are mostly concerned about the economic problems. This is proved by a long list of respondents’ answers to the open question on the pressing internal problems of our country (see Table 1). As one can see, the economics dominates in the list. In this regard people’s viewpoints greatly differ from those of A. Lukashenko who have recently for several hours tried to prove the topicality of not economic but ideological problems.

WHAT THE BELARUSIANS EXPECT FROM INTEGRATION WITH RUSSIA

Survey findings reveal that nine of the ten adult Belarusians (89.1%) have already come to some conclusions on what they will have in case of our country’s incorporation into Russia (See Table 1). As one can see, 45.5% of the respondents expect to see positive results and 1.5-fold less people (30.1%) expect negative results. Another 13.5% of the respondents don’t expect any outcomes.

SPRING AGGRAVATION OF INTEGRATION MOODS

The survey findings show that the autumn crisis of integration moods within Belarusian electorate caused by the tenseness in relations between A. Lukashenko and V. Putin seems has finally wound up this spring. As we see from Table 1, the number of those who support the idea of Russia-Belarus’ unification into a single state has increased 1.2-fold for the past three months (from 21.2% to 25.6%) whereas the number of those who support the integration variants that presuppose maintaining independence of both countries has decreased by 4.1 points. And although at present there are 2.6-fold more supporters of independence than the “unionists”, the tendency is obvious.

SECRECY OF PRESCHEDULED VOTING

Now, the election to the local Councils has been held. Attitudes of the official authorities, opposition and the international community have been spoken out and widely spread by the mass media. The authorities are satisfied with the election; lawyers and opposition claim there were a lot of violations of the election legislation and democratic character of the election raises many questions. To complete the picture, we need to know what voters think of how the election campaign was carried. As we see, only one fifth of the respondents confirmed that there were many violations of law during the election, and among them there are 4-fold more respondents who voted for candidates-opponents of A. Lukashenko than those who supported candidates-supporters of A. Lukashenko (See Table 1).

HONESTY OF COUNT OF VOTES RAISES DOUBTS

While evaluating the recent election into local councils, ODIHR OSCE observers noted that the official Belarusian authorities turned it into a campaign on support of their political course among population. We should admit few changes have taken place for the past four years in this regard. There was an impression during the election that the interests of the authorities came up to two things – make the election campaign at once mass and inconspicuous (not to awake people’s political activity) and maintain control over the local Councils called by the president a support of the regime.