E-bulletin of IISEPS Center for Documentation, N 9, 2008 – ISSN 1822-5578 (only Russian)
Content:
Introduction
1. Basic trends of September
2. Chronicle of key events
3. Politics
3.1. Who stood up whom?
3.2. An invitation for a dance
4. Economics
4.1. Striking by a new foreign-made car at the impassability of roads
4.2. Replenishment in the list of sacral words
5. Finances
5.1. The gold-rush
6. Good news
7. Our forecast for October
8. From the IISEPS Desktop
Introduction:
Dear readers!
As we supposed, regularly scheduled parliamentary elections in Belarus were held under the conditions of the absence of elections. Purely formally electors had a choice. Moreover if in 2004 the Central Election Committee registered 47 opposition candidates, than this time their number has almost doubled having risen up to a quite decent by Belarusian standards number of 78 people. However, none of them was a serious competitor for any of the “necessary” candidates. Even such a famous opposition politician as the leader of the Belarusian Party of Communists S. Kalyakin according to the final minutes got only 15.6% of votes.
The elections only had one round – it is another Belarusian tradition. It does not matter how many candidates are registered at a certain constituency, it does not matter how equal they are in their unpopularity among the electors, one of them is always fated to collect more than a half of all votes. Such a candidate can be as a rule defined beforehand. For this purpose it is enough to get to know the competitors’ for the deputy chair place of work.
The creative move of the authorities concerning the possible admission of individual representatives of the opposition into the parliament also completely justified itself. It split up the quite well-shaped ranks of the opposition into supporters and opponents of the elections boycott, and as a result of it the already scanty resources were spent on internal showdowns. The split, just as we assumed, touched upon “the party bodies, as well as the individual candidates”.
The fact that both adversarial parties may consider themselves losers should also be regarded as a peculiarity of the elections in question: the opposition – on account of another electoral Waterloo, and the authorities – owing to the refusal of the West to acknowledge the results of the voting. As we supposed, the authorities stock of compromises turned out to be quite modest, and it had been completely exhausted long before the beginning of voting.
What we were entirely mistaken about was the forecast about the possible involvement of Russia in the Belarusian elections. An impression has formed that they did not know anything about them in the Kremlin, do not know and do not want to know. We did not hear any reaction appropriate to the moment on the part of the Russian governing body regarding the parliamentary elections (this, by the way, one more time demonstrated that the partners in the Union state are very well aware about the decorativeness of the Belarusian parliament). On the contrary, an impression took shape that amnesia had also covered the questions concerning the gas price for the forthcoming year and recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence by Belarus.
IISEPS executive board