BELARUS – FOR BELARUSIANS?

In the course of research, we studied connection between the language the respondents use for everyday communication and their political standpoints. According to this research, those who speak Russian in everyday life are more disposed to Belarus’ accession into Europe and less – to integration into Russia and they are also less supporters of President A. Lukashenko than Belarusian-speaking respondents. In our September polling we made an attempt to find out how political standpoints of respondents are connected with their nationality. In Table 1, you may see how the respondents are distributed into groups on their nationality (the question is open and respondents themselves told their nationality). The polling results are very close to the population census in this regards.

Table 1. Nationality of respondents, %

Table 2 shows difference of attitude of these nationalities to a number of political problems in Belarus. For better comparison, all nationalities except Belarusians and Russians are united into the category “Other nationality.”

Thus, other nationalities are closer to Belarusians than the Russians only in the state status of languages. In their turn, Russians differ greatly from Belarusians in their standpoints. Yet, only a quarter of the Russians and every tenth Belarusian stand for making their language the only state language in Belarus. Dominating for all nationalities is the group supporting equality of status for both languages.

Table 2. Connection between political preferences and nationality*, %

* Table is read down

As regards the home policy, the differences aren’t exposed clearly: other nationalities place themselves among the opposition (although deviation falls within representative error); the Belarusians to the greatest extent want to preserve the current situation in what concerns voting for either the acting president or for an opposition representative while other nationalities – to the least extent; the Russians stay in the middle.

In the integration issue, the Russians are close to the Belarusians in their viewpoints and insignificant deviations on similar issues have different sings: Russians are more inclined to accession of Belarus into the EU if the question is alternative and less inclined in a question giving various geopolitical variants. At the same time, other nationalities (Poles, Ukrainians, etc.) demonstrate obviously stronger pro-European and pro-Western aspirations than Belarusians or Russians.

Data in Table 2 reveals that in a certain sense Belarus really is for Belarusians. In particular, their political aspirations are close to average throughout the country. This happens partially because of relatively small number of other nationalities: even with great deviation of their opinion from the opinion of Belarusians, they are too few to influence an average position in the country. Yet a more important reason is absence of any significant deviations: Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and other national minorities all give approximately the same political estimates as the Belarusians. We don’t mean unanimity here (there are as well different opinions among the Belarusians) but the ratio of estimates given by the Belarusians and by other national groups aren’t very different.

All this drives to reconsidering the nationalist slogan “Belarus – for Belarusians” since it comes out that, politically, all citizens of Belarus are Belarusians.