THE INVERTED PYRAMID

Among the three institutions enjoying the strongest trust of Belarusians (Table 1) are “all familiar faces”: the Orthodox Church, the President and the Army. Over the past year, the trust index (the difference of positive and negative answers divided by the number of respondents answered) of the Orthodox Church has not changed, while the President advanced considerably and moved from the third to the second position. The country is facing the beginning of the election campaign and this position advance should not surprise anybody.

Table 1. Distribution of answers to the question, “Do you trust the following governmental and public institutions?” and dynamics of trust indices, %

All the three institutions play a symbolic role in the society. They make it possible for the Belarusians to sense their national identity: through the sense of satisfaction with the force of the Army, which had won “our Victory” and through the truth, which “the true faith” brings. Well, as for the President it is pertinent to quote the academician A. Rubinov: “All that (intensification of patriotism, trust in our own country, in its future) became possible due to the unique personality of the country’s president, who welded around himself an overwhelming part of the community, showed simple and clear ways of our development”.

Against the rise of the President’s trust index, the index of the government has slightly fallen. And there is a definite reason for it. The gap between “the only politician” and his suite has to widen amid the developing political campaign and so we see it.

In March elections to Local Councils were held in Belarus. In spite of the massive voter turnout, almost 65%, more than a half of Belarusians do not trust local representative authorities which is confirmed by the negative trust index. No improvement of the rate of trust to the key institution responsible for providing the nation-wide expression of will, i.e. CEC, was registered.

The National Assembly also receded considerably from its position. Its role in the life of the community was not clear to the majority of Belarusians even before the crisis. The crisis has only highlighted the dummy role of the main legislative body of the country.

For “the unique personality” to be able to weld the people around it, it should be beyond criticism and reasonable assessments. The suite – that is the body one can and should criticize, therefore no wonder that the escalation of trust towards the chief executive of the country in conditions of the crisis is accompanied by more critical assessments of his own entourage (Table 2). It gets “duller” and “duller”, and this only highlights the uniqueness of “the unique personality” even without that.

Table 2. Dynamics of answering the question, “Does the circle of president A. Lukashenko consist now of able and enterprising specialists or of “dull”, passive and insufficiently qualified persons?”, %

The bottom line of Table 1 is traditionally filled by the opposition the parties; however their trust index has never been so low. Before each election campaign debates commence among the opposition the parties as regards the formation of pre-election coalitions and the mode of participation in the pending elections. Strictly speaking, the activity of the parties has never been beyond the scope of these debates on intraparty topics. In 2010 the intensity of such debates has peaked. And here are the results (Table 3). Each line of the last column illustrates a kind of record of the last years. As the phrase goes: have it coming.

Table 3. Dynamics of answering the question, “Do you trust the opposition parties?”, %

Aerially high rating of “the unique personality” is the other side of the coin of distrust of the institutional system as a whole. Hence, the power pyramid in Belarus rests on its top. There is nothing unusual about it. In the personalistic authoritarian orders it happens rather more often than not.