Monthly Archive: January 2015

December survey results demonstrate that pro-Russian aspirations and desires of integration with Russia in Belarusian society became somewhat more reserved. At the same time pro-European moods slightly increased. Change of attitude to Russia is probably explained by a certain re-thinking of Russian policy in Ukraine.
During half a year evaluations of “Crimeaisours” were changing slowly, but steadily: the number of adherents of Russian version was slightly decreasing, while advocates of the opposite version were becoming slightly more numerous (graph 1).

The topic of social unity is one of the main topics of the head of state’s speeches. Naturally, he didn’t avoid it in his seasonal greetings, but this time he approached it differently, from the split viewpoint: “We saw for ourselves what internal feuding, hatred and intolerance lead to. The line between bright and loud slogans and society split is very thin. The line between this split and a war is even thinner. And if people forget about the value of peace and consent, they cross all these lines in a blink of an eye”.
Global practice shows that democracy is the most efficient tool to overcome splits. However, there is no such tool in the arsenal of present power.

A range of questions from IISEPS archive was included in December survey, and this gives us an opportunity to track the dynamics of social opinion in Belarus over two decades.
In 1993 under the circumstances of democratic chaos (today A. Lukashenko actively resists its return) personal relations and dishonesty were seen as unarguable leaders in the list of sources of wealth (graph 1). The last place was taken by education. During the years of stability labor took the leadership, still personal relations never went lower than the second place.

Belarusian power spent the year 2013 in desperate attempts to increase efficiency of economy at the expense of technical modernization of state enterprises. But the only noticeable results of these efforts were multibillion losses (expressed in dollars).
In 2014 it was decided to move from total modernization to pin-point modernization. This guaranteed a loss decrease, but however it didn’t solve the issue of economy efficiency increase. That is why in order to address the more and more acute external and internal challenges the power turned to ideas from the arsenal of soviet nomenklatura like tightening of discipline.

Growth of trust to the head of state and state institutions happened during the year when the level of evaluations of unfavorable changes in country’s economy was three times as high as the level of positive evaluations (graph 1). In September 2008, just before the beginning of the world financial crisis, shares of favorable and unfavorable evaluations was almost equal.

Approaching exhaustion of mobilization resource is also confirmed by dynamics of A. Lukashenko’s ratings (graphs 1-2). Their growth gave way to a reduction. Electoral rating (percentage of votes, which a politician received in answers to an open question “If presidential elections were held tomorrow, for whom would you vote?”) dropped by 5.2 points in December compared to September. Despite that, the head of state’s “annual balance” turned out to be positive, and he should be thankful for this to Russian TV.

Real after-tax money income of population over January-November 2014 amounted to 101.1% relatively to the same period of 2013. A year before this figure was notably higher – 117.2%. However, such a considerable decrease of income growth rate influenced the perception of economic crisis quite paradoxically: in December 2013 68.6% of respondents shared the opinion that Belarusian economy is in crisis, while in December 2014 this share amounted only to 52.3% (graph 1).

While analyzing the results of December survey, one must remember that it was conducted before the government and the National bank made a number of decisions which restricted the conditions of foreign currency purchase. This is an official wording which in fact means a 30% devaluation of Belarusian ruble.

Wikipedia defines paternalism (from the Latin pater – father) as behavior by a state, which limits some person or group’s liberty or autonomy for that person’s or group’s own good.
In turn paternalism in regard to a state should be regarded as a form of rational adaptation of a person to almighty and uncontrolled power. When nothing depends on a person, he adopts this natural, normal and perfectly rational setup: there is no point in fussing, let the state take care of all my concerns now and in future.