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28/10/2020

Belarus at the crossroads?

International affairs Russia

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Roman Krakovsky

Historian, Lecturer at the University of Geneva

On August 9, Alexander Lukashenko, in power for 26 years, was reappointed as President of Belarus. Since then, a protest movement of unprecedented scale soared in the country, demanding the dismissal of the leader and for new, more democratic elections to be held. Why is the country struggling to turn the page on autocracy and why is this protest happening today?

A new social contract between the power and the people

The answer to these questions lies in the nature of the social contract between the power and the people that Alexander Lukashenko has built since coming to power in 1994. In the mid-1990s, the country found itself in a systemic crisis. With the break-up of the USSR in 1991, the Belarusian Soviet Republic gained independence and became Belarus. But the fall of communism brought with it an unprecedented economic crisis. In 1994, the country recorded a growth rate of -12% and had to face mass unemployment.

The war against entrepreneurs seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of the nation spread quickly to Lukashenko's opponents and the free media.

As in Russia, the privatizations of enterprises and state cooperatives allowed the rise of the oligarchy and contributed to the widening of social inequalities. Between 1993 and 1999, the GINI index rose from 21.6 to 31.3. In 1998, 11.6% of the population lived on less than a dollar a day.

In 1994, Alexander Lukashenko was elected with a populist program that promised to limit privatizations, prevent the squandering of the nation's assets and fight against the corruption that accompanied these transfers of property.

He also proposed to develop a "market socialism", an alternative to liberal capitalism and its savage forms introduced in the countries of the former Eastern bloc in the early 1990s.

Lukashenko fulfilled his promises. By regulating privatizations, he maintained the dominant role of the state in the economy, in which today, the private sector only accounts for 20-30%, making Belarus one of the few countries with a "Soviet-type economy".

This position allowed the state to continue to play the role of the "protector" that characterized it during the Soviet period. Socialist public services were maintained and the State has developed a vast program to modernize the countryside. The social benefit system is among the most generous in the world, providing people with access to health and education services, an exception in the former Eastern bloc countries. Unemployment is reduced to zero and wages are regularly upgraded. The country is rapidly resuming growth and reducing poverty levels significantly. Between 1998 and 2015, the share of the country's income captured by the richest 10% of households decreased from 24.9% to 21.2%, while during the same period, the share of income of the 10% of households the poorest increased from 3.1% to 4.1%. This development was rewarded in 2004 by a laudatory report from the World Bank, stressing that "the political measures put in place have succeeded in maintaining the standard of living and reducing poverty better than in several economies in transition".

But the war against entrepreneurs seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of the nation spread quickly to Lukashenko's opponents and the free media. A new "social contract" between the power and the people emerged: in exchange for protecting populations from the harmful effects of transition and constantly improving their well-being, the State demanded obedience and disinterest in politics.

This development is not accidental. This "social contract" is reminiscent of the one drawn up by the communist regimes after de-Stalinization and which ensured their longevity for nearly 40 years. Lukashenko is perfectly familiar with its operation and its benefits. At the time of the fall of communism, he was one of the young rising elites of the Party, perfectly integrated into the Soviet power system. Director of a collective farm during the USSR, in 1990 he was elected deputy to the Supreme Council of the Belarusian Republic.

The management of the Covid-19 crisis was the coup de grâce which definitively broke this "social contract".

From this perspective, his regime appears as a product and an extension of a vanished empire which refuses to make history.

The end of a fragile balance

For nearly 20 years, this "social contract" worked, cementing social peace and ensuring the regime's longevity. However, when the country plunged into another economic crisis, in 2015, this fragile balance was shattered. State coffers were empty and wages started to stagnate. The government had to adopt unpopular measures, such as raising the retirement age.

Moreover, since the 1980s, the country has been experiencing a systemic demographic crisis that compromises the future of the community. From 1986, the fertility rate fell below the threshold of 2.2 children per woman, necessary for the renewal of generations. After 1991, emigration aggravated the situation, since it was mostly young people and the most educated who left.

The management of the Covid-19 crisis was the coup de grâce which definitively broke this "social contract". Alexander Lukashenko underestimated the crisis, claiming that the virus was a collective psychosis and could be cured with a sauna, fresh air or vodka. The political choice not to deal with the Covid-19 crisis turned out to be a strategic error. A question of individual health, in other words a private and non-political issue, became eminently political when not properly managed, as the danger of contamination by the virus concerns everyone. The fear of being infected brought out the vile nature of power, concerned primarily with its own survival rather than with the well-being of the population. Moreover, the denial of the health crisis and his decision not to quarantine the country deprived Lukashenko of the possibility of canceling or postponing the presidential election due to the pandemic, and thus giving himself more time to find answers to a tense economic and social situation. The health crisis thus came to materialize this breaking of the "social contract" between state and society: since the regime is not fulfilling its part of the contract, that is to say protecting the population, the population no longer feels obliged to fulfill its part either, which is staying out of political life.

The protests thus transformed into a mass movement, a first since Lukashenko came to power in 1994. In the absence of the usual means of pressure - (almost) all of Lukashenko's opponents were dismissed or forced to give up - the protest moved onto the streets, demanding the dismissal of the leader now considered as illegitimate. It remains to be seen whether Belarus will make a connection between the imperative of the individual’s well-being and democracy, and if the fight against Lukashenko will transform into a larger fight for democracy, or at least for a more democratic system.

Copyright : Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP

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