Monthly Archive: August 2011

The data of the December opinion poll give us an opportunity to estimate attitude of Belarusians to the overthrow of the Libyan leader M. Gaddafi (Table 1).
Table 1. Distribution of answers to the question: “Ruler of Libya Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed last year as a result of months-long battles. What do you think about the events that happened there?”

In the course of the December opinion poll respondents were asked traditional questions about their geopolitical orientation. Trends of the answers to the corresponding questions are presented in the following tables (Tables 1-3).

At the beginning of November A. Lukashenko announced creating of a territorial defense system in Belarus. According to the plan, it should become something like another army, a partisan movement just like the one that existed in Belarus during the years of World War II. The territorial defense announcement was made at the final stage of the Libyan revolution. The idea was partly motivated by the events in Libya where an insurrection of M. Gaddafi’s opponents was supported by NATO forces.

At the end of November D. Konovalov and V. Kovalev accused of organizing an act of terror in Minsk underground were sentenced to the supreme penalty – execution. Just the way it should be in a split society, public opinion concerning the complicity of the persons under sentence of death in the act of terror in Minsk underground was divided: 37% believed the guilt of the sentenced, 43.4% did not believe it and 19.6%

In spite of the notion spread in our daily life, a decrease in the population’s income does not lead to a growth in the protest moods. This political science axiom is being mastered with difficulty by the expert community in Belarus. Hopes for a “hot” autumn, which once again were not fated to come true, follow from here (Table 1). Formally, the number of those who proclaimed their readiness to participate in protest actions proved to be even smaller than in December 2008 when the situation in the country had begun to take a turn for the worse under the influence of the world financial crisis.

The September historic minimum of A. Lukashenko’s electoral rating did not remain unnoticed by its owner: on October 7 in the course of a press conference for the mass media of Russian regions head of the Belarusian state expounded his view on the dynamics of his own rating. He began with a description of a point of view rather popular among average citizens concerning the reliability of the results of public opinion polls:

In spite of the fact that under the influence of objective and subjective factors certain progress in supporting the authorities and the policy pursued by them has begun to show for the last three months, a demand for changes remains on a record high level in Belarusian society (Table 1). As is the established tradition in Belarus, presidential elections concur with the peak of social payments.

In the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Belarusians the year of 2011 turned out to be more difficult than the previous one (Table 1). A. Lukashenko also supported the assessment in the course of the press conference for the Belarusian and foreign mass media on December 23: “I would not want such a year to repeat itself once again in the history of our country. It was a very difficult year”.

A timid hint at a growth in the positive attitude registered in September took shape of a clear tendency in December. Let us refer to Tables 1-3. If in September the financial standing index (FSI) and the expectation index (EI) increased by 3.2 and 3.8 percentage points respectively, and the index of policy correctness (PCI) continued to decrease (–15.8 points relative to September), then in December the FSI added 15.9, the EI – 11.9, and the PCI – 21.4 percentage points! What gave rise to such a drastic change of the trend – objective or subjective reasons?