Monthly Archive: January 2007

RESULTS OF THE NATION OPINION POLL CONDUCTED ON JANUARY 20-30, 2007

(1474 persons interviewed, margin of error does not exceed 0.03)   1. It was 15 years on December 10, 2006 from the day of Belovezhskoe Agreement. What do you think about it now? (more than one answer is possible) Variant of answer % It’s just an episode showing struggle for power in country’s top echelons …

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BULLETINS INFOFOCUS № 1

E-bulletin of IISEPS Center for Documentation, N 1, 2007 – ISSN 1822-5578 (only Russian) Content: Introduction Theme of the month: Election into Local Councils of Deputies: Finding Solution or Just Talking? Person of the month: Alexander Lukashenko: Tactic Move or New Strategy? Document of the month: Oil Agreement: End or Another Stage of the Conflict? …

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MEDIA PUBLICATIONS IN 2007

21 Jan

MAJORITY IS AGAINST “CONTRACTUAL SYSTEM FOR WHOLE COUNTRY”

In accordance with Table 1, today two out of five voters stand against mass conversion of private sector employees to short-term labor contracts actively practiced over lately. Although the population is gradually adapting to the “contractual system for the whole country”, zeal officials ready to beat the bushes have taken the situation to absurd. Contracts may be signed for the term of six months or even shorter. Of course, this cannot have mass support and only every fifth respondent approves the contractual system.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

State independence is quite an intricate thing. It’s hard to understand for population whether they benefited or lost from it. Therefore, the public opinion divided into three and not into two groups when answering to the direct question about personal benefit/loss – about a third of respondents (31.6%) found it difficult to answer this question. However, the group of winners from Belarusian independence is larger than the group of losers (38.1% vs. 29.4%). This really encourages.

SOCIAL INTERFERENCE

As they say, we learn wisdom by the follies of others. This applies to the Belarusians as well. Inflation of early 90-ies is still alive in people’s memory, and so when the lords of the Union State started bickering, their villains without going into details of who was right fled to exchange offices to purchase hard currency. Such financial activity of population affects currency rates. During the January opinion poll sociologists registered a turn in currency preferences of Belarusians. (See Table 1).

WHAT ECONOMICS DO BELARUSIANS NEED?

If we analyze answers of respondents for the past ten years to the question about the economics model they prefer, we will see surprising stability of the market economy supporters. As Table 1 shows, about two thirds of adult population preferred the market economy during all this period.
At the same time, the number of planned economy adherents has gone down 2.3-fold over this period and it is possible to say that only every seventh adult Belarusian is nowadays a supporter of socialist economic model. This is twice as little as the number of pensioners.

OIL & GAS WAR: “TIE IN THE BATTLE”

Any outsider watching January newsreels on the Belarusian TV would definitely decide that there was unscheduled presidential election or at least another crucial referendum announced in the country. Informational activity of the head of state was a safe indicator of this. It is due to this activity that a row between Belarusian economic entities and their Russian partners turned into gas and oil war between the two states.

INTEGRATION BREAKTHROUGH

Public opinion is pretty pliant especially when it trusts the information source. As of now, it still does. The rating of trust to A. Lukashenko (country’s chief political informant) has dropped by 4.9 points as compared to November of 2006 but it still remains unattainable (55.4%).

YET THE TENDENCY

“The election into the 25th Local Councils of Deputies has taken place!” We deliberately put this sentence into inverted commas. This is a quote from the article “Local Councils have been formed” published in Sovetskaya Belorussia of January 16. Let’s quote it on: “All the concerns about activity of voters cleared away on the voting day when the first preliminary results just started coming from polling stations. The final data was announced yesterday – 78.7%! Can anyone say after this that the Local Election is of little importance?…”