RUSSIA PROFILE.org October 3, 2005 Mr. Right for Belarus? By Dmitry Babich Russia Profile Opposition Unites to Name Presidential Candidate After being able to unite behind a single candidate until just a few short weeks before the last vote in 2001, the Belarussian opposition has long been encouraged not to make the same mistake ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for July 2006. The opposition parties announced on Sunday, at the end of a two-day congress, that they had found their man. The Congress of Belarussian Democratic Forces, a motley crew of politicians and public activists opposing Lukashenko, brought together a wide range of pro-democracy groups, from members of one of the country’s two communist parties to the nationalist Belarussian Popular Front (BNF), made physics professor Alexander Milinkevich their choice. Milinkevich edged out a veteran opposition politician and leader of the United Civic Party Anatoly Lebedko 399 votes to 391 in a second round of voting in Minsk. It was the first opposition congress permitted in the capital by President Alexander Lukashenko since he came to power in 1994. The independent Internet site Naviny reported that the choice of Milinkevich may have been the result of his relatively low profile. Milinkevich has worked in academia most of his adult life, as a professor in his hometown at the University of Grodno. The remaining candidates, including Lebedko, were all deemed to be carrying baggage from their careers that could potentially be exploited by Lukashenko’s side ahead of and during the election campaign. Up until 1996, for example, Lebedko had supported Lukashenko in the Belarussian parliament, where the two had worked together in the early 1990s. Stanislav Shushkevich, the former chairman of the Belarussian Supreme Soviet, became famous as one of the architects of the Belavezhye agreements that put an end to the Soviet Union in December 1991. The agreements, signed by Shushkevich, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his Ukrainian colleague, Leonid Kravchuk, are very unpopular with many Belarussians who have relatives in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. As a result, Shushkevich withdrew his candidacy before Sunday’s vote. The Congress’s participants apparently believed that Milinkevich stands a chance against Lukashenko despite the fact that he is a virtual unknown to most voters. “Milinkevich’s electorate consists of people who want change in Belarus, and this, according to the polls, represents 65 percent of the population,” said Lev Margolin, an economist and one of the leaders of the United Civic Party. Milinkevich’s candidacy, however, was nominated by the BNF. This political movement, formed in the wake of pro-independence sentiment of the late 1980s, favors making Belarussian the country’s sole official language, stripping Russian, which is used by most of the country’s population in their daily lives, of this status. “The fact that Milinkevich was nominated by the BNF may scare away part of the anti-Lukashenko electorate,” said Kirill Poznyak, a political commentator on the Naviny web site. “We should not forget that Lukashenko has the support of 40 per cent of the Belarussian population,” said Sergei Milyutin, the head of the department of political science at the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. “This may be less than the number of people who want change, but it is more than any opposition candidate can hope for at the moment. So, an opposition candidate who really wants to win can’t afford to alienate the pro-Russian electorate.” Milyutin, whose department conducted a poll on the preferences of Belarussian voters, ushered a delegation from the Congress of Democratic Forces around Moscow last week. The next problem for Milinkevich will be raising his profile with the electorate and familiarizing the voters with his policy platform. State-owned television is off limits to opposition candidates, except for short appearances during coverage of parliamentary and presidential campaigns. The opposition newspapers “Narodnaya Volya,” “Belorusskiye Novosti” and “Svobodniye novosti” each have circulations of only 10,000 to 25,000 copies, a drop in the sea in a country with a population of just under 10 million, while anti-Lukashenko radio broadcasts from Poland and Germany are popular only among certain groups in the population. The BNF even organized protests against a special Belarus service on Germany’s Deutsche Welle because the broadcasts were planned only in Russian as the provision of broadcasts in both official languages was deemed too expensive. The other problem, however, is how to prevent the current president from rigging the upcoming vote. “We can only win if we press really hard for two things,” said Valery Frolov, a former Soviet general and an opposition activist who many believed was being groomed for the role of the opposition candidate before the Congress. “The first is to bar Lukashenko from running for a third time. The second is to change the Electoral Code.” Lukashenko pushed through a referendum on changes to the constitution last October, allowing him to run for the office of president an unlimited number of times. Milinkevich did not go into details on how he planned to prevent Lukashenko’s side from tampering with the vote next year. “I will be in the street together with everyone, because we can’t do it without the street,” Milinkevich said on Sunday, in an apparent reference to the events in Kiev in December and January, when street demonstrations ultimately led the Ukrainian Supreme Court to overturn the results of a win by Viktor Yanukovich in presidential elections. Viktor Yushchneko subsequently won a re-run of the second round of the elections. Lukashenko, whose decision to allow the Congress to convene in Minsk came as a surprise to many, returned to his usual ways after the Congress finished its session, labeling the participants “the worst enemies of our country” and charging that “they were completely under Western control.” © Russia Profile 2005 Privacy policy | Terms & conditions | Advertising guide