A DIFFICULT YEAR
The economic crisis has undoubtedly influenced the assessment of the outgoing year. Its first signs had appeared in October and by the time of the opinion poll conducting (the first half of December), it managed to show its worth aloud which was registered by the public opinion. Let us remind that the January opinion poll of 2007 was conducted at the height of the Belarusian-Russian "oil and gas war", that is why 9.6 percentage points growth in the share of citizens who chose the variant of answer "More difficult" should be regarded as evidence of negative changes large scale...

IN SEARCH OF A STRATEGICAL DIRECTION
Something wrong begins to happen in the "Danish kingdom". The share of respondents who suppose that the state of affairs in the country is developing in the right direction has decreased by 8.1 percentage points for the last three months. From among the disappointed ones, by no means not all have changed their opinion concerning the country’s development course into a reverse one...

LOGIC OF ANXIOUS EXPECTATIONS
To measure the social temperature in the course of national opinion polls specialists of the IISEPS by the existing longstanding tradition use two questions: "How has your personal financial position changed for the last three months?" and "How is the socio-economic situation in Belarus going to change within the next few years?" Both questions offer the same set of answer variants which allows us to compare the obtained results...

A FIRM TIN SOLDIER
The swooped indices of the financial position and expectations did not carry along ratings of the head of the Belarusian state. At best, the electoral rating as well as the rating of trust gave a start. A year ago when an unexpected rise in prices literally shocked the Belarusians, decrease of ratings was more considerable. The mentioned facts from the life of ratings can be explained by the following: so far the economic crisis has touched the majority of the country’s citizens only by its media constituent...

NOT OUR CRISIS
When asked directly if an economic crisis was breaking out in Belarus, 64.3% of the Belarusians answered "yes" at the beginning of December (20.4% did not think so and 15.3% found it difficult to answer). Thus the world-wide economic crisis has not touched upon more than a third of the country’s citizens so far, and they continue to feel residents of a stability island named "Belarus"...

THE LONG TRAVEL WIND
The economic crisis, in the opinion of the majority of respondents, was triggered in Belarus from without, was a consequence of the worldwide financial crisis the center of which became the West. Thanks to it, apparently, an additional desire to leave home places and set off for foreign lands in search of happiness did not arise by the Belarusians after an encounter with the facts of wage payment delay. There now, they have enough of their own problems...

HOMO WELL-INFORMED
Sociologists like to single out human types in the process of analysis. For instance, sociologists of Yu. Levada School for twenty years have been studying "a simple Soviet man" who can easily become transformed into a "Homo dissatisfied", a "Homo cunning" and so on depending on the external circumstances. Acting on the analogy, we will try to single out the type of a "Homo well-informed"...

THE FINAL DIAGNOSIS
"From a chronic disease corruption has developed into a cancerous growth". It is difficult not to agree with such a diagnosis given by the head of state already in March. He knows what he is saying as, first of all, he possesses personal experience of many years in the struggle against this evil, and secondly, he must have at his disposal complete information owing to his position in the authoritative hierarchy. This diagnosis does not conflict with a conclusion inferred for Belarus by an international group of "doctors" from Transparency International either...

WHAT KIND OF PARTY IS IT?
On October, 25 a founding congress of the Republican non-government association “Belaya Rus” took place. The congress was postponed more than once and each transfer gave rise to a tide of comments. The main intrigue was rotating around the assumption about a possible transformation of the non-government association into a presidential party. A. Lukashenko himself time and again rejected such a possibility, including in his annual message in April...

GEOPOLITICAL COORDINATES OF BELARUS
Results of the December opinion poll testify to the fact that no considerable changes have occurred in the geopolitical preferences of the Belarusians for the last three months. In particular, although the record low index of pro-European attitudes registered in September of the previous year has somewhat increased (however, the change is within the bounds of the sampling error), the number of Euro-integration opponents as before exceeds the number of its supporters...

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