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BULLETINS INFOFOCUS № 3

E-bulletin of IISEPS Center for Documentation, N 3, 2015 – ISSN 1822-5578 (only Russian)

Content:

Introduction
1. Basic trends of March
2. Chronicle of key events
3. Politics
3.1. Managing lawmakers and lawmaking managers
3.2. A fuss over a tenth of a percentage point
4. Economics
4.1. Japanization of Europe
4.2. Do you need a limo or a lift?
4.3. After the order “Don’t make it worse!” it didn’t become better
5. Finances
5.1. “Belarus is our Greece today”
6. Our forecast for April
7. From the IISEPS desktop

Introduction:

Dear readers!

In the forecast for March we’ve supposed that presidential election campaign in 2015 may be quite “boring” unlike the previous ones. The longstanding head of Belarusian state will be pushed to this innovative political technology by the new economic reality: positive trends transformed into negative ones, incomes’ growth of many years was replaced by a decrease. One of central elements of previous campaigns was bragging about the achieved successful results. But these results are in the past, so there is no demand for bragging.
The subject of election campaign has never been brought to the forefront in March speeches of A. Lukashenko. As for his closest comrades-in-arms, we turn the attention of the Infofocus readers to the fact that neither Chairman of Council of Republic M. Myasnikovich nor Chairman of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus V. Andreichenko mentioned the topic of elections in their statements. This coordination cannot be accidental; it was probably imposed by President’s Administration.
As we’ve predicted, there were no significant changes of Belarusian ruble exchange-value. Import decreases faster than export, thus the internal demand for foreign currency declines too. Decrease of salaries also contributes to it (in January-February real earnings decreased by 3.2% in comparison with the same period in 2014).
We’ve expected that the issue with the credit, which Belarusian government hopes to receive from Russia within the framework of the joint program of anti-crisis measures, will be cleared up. And this is what happened. However, the amount of the credit ($ 110 million) has certainly surprised us. And it was surprising not only for us: A. Lukashenko hoped that Russia would back Belarus up, but it seems that they had tripped Belarus up.So the struggle for credit resources will go on.

IISEPS executive board

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