" The Election Game: " Authoritarian Consolidation Processes in Belarus (original) (raw)
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Nationalities Papers, 2021
On August 9, 2020, presidential elections were held in Belarus. Despite blatant electoral fraud and procedural violations, the official results declared Aleksandr Lukashenka reelected for a sixth term. While in the past, even the most obviously fraudulent election results have been followed by an atmosphere of resigned acceptance, this time countless Belarusians took to the streets to contest the results. What made this election different? This analysis of current affairs looks at the 2020 events through the lens of authoritarian consolidation theory, suggesting the unprecedented political mobilization was enabled by erosion in the three pillars of authoritarian stability: repression, cooptation, and legitimation. A majority of the population had been accepting the political status quo out of fear, for social and monetary security provided in exchange for loyalty, or a general understanding that there were no alternatives. Lukashenka did not realize this had largely changed. Nine months later, the foundation of the authoritarian regime is in an even worse shape. The regime's reliance on repression further counteracts the legitimacy of the system. As a result, it seems it will be difficult for the authorities to re-consolidate authoritarianism, at least in the near future, no matter how the 'revolution' unfolds.
Society in the authoritarian discourse: The case of the 2020 presidential election in Belarus
Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2021
In August 2020, the presidential election took place in Belarus, followed by unprecedented mass protests due to apparent election fraud. Aliaksandr Lukashenka, the country's long-term authoritarian leader, faced the biggest electoral challenge since his first election in 1994. This article analyzes his official rhetoric during the campaign and after the election focusing on the image of the society. For this purpose, discourse-historical approach is applied to understand his political vision of the developments in Belarus and to explore changes in his rhetoric caused by the unprecedented challenge to his power. The research demonstrates that Lukashenka acts as a classical authoritarian ruler with respective discursive strategies. The text shows that he adopted the imaginary role of Belarus's strict father, who has assumed full responsibility for its fate and offensively reacts to every challenger of this role. It also reveals that Lukashenka sees his personal contract with the Belarusian society as a stable and durable instrument that does not require changes and per se implies his personal engagement as a party to it. Finally, the analysis of Lukashenka's rhetoric in 2020 suggests that a voluntary transition of power in Belarus remains rather wishful thinking.
Revisiting Electoral Tactics in Belarus: Local Elections 2018
Baltic Worlds, 2018
Lukashenka is not going to undermine or change electoral strategies that have worked well for sustaining the regime. But the regime will be employing other non-electoral strategies to hold on to its power. The established political system maintains a number of preemptive mechanisms that prevent public mobilization and collective action. The spontaneous use of selective justice and disproportional measures, including a 72-hour detention of journalists, signaled to the general public that the Belarusian leadership still holds power to change rules and to tilt the level playing field for other political actors.
Making Sense of a Surprise: Perspectives on the 2020 “Belarusian Revolution”
Nationalities Papers
Drawing on three theoretical perspectives—“protest-democracy,” “authoritarian/patronal regime dynamics,” and “contentious politics”—developed in the study of popular protests in post-Soviet electoral autocracies, this article argues, first, that the 2020 postelection mobilization in Belarus was not to be expected for both structural and agency-related reasons. Second, by the summer of 2020, the political opportunity structure had opened up because of contingent choices by individual actors, with Alyaksandr Lukashenka committing several major mistakes, particularly on pandemic (non)control and the administration of the upcoming presidential election, and political newcomers taking on the role of challenging him. After the election, mass mobilization unfolded in two waves triggered by two additional regime mistakes: blatant electoral fraud and excessive repression. These mistakes served as focal points for spontaneous coordination, substituting for the deliberate “engineering” of prot...
Post-election protests in Belarus as a tool of political technology. Working hypothes
Przegląd Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego
The author analyzes the course of the elections in Belarus in 2020 and the socio-political protests caused by election fraud. On the basis of the anomalies noted in the activities of the security service of the Republic of Belarus the author puts forward a hypothesis about the possible involvement of the Russian secret services in provoking the post-election crisis in order to reduce the margin of political maneuver for the Lukashenka regime.
Power, People, and the Political: Understanding the Many Crises in Belarus
Nationalities Papers
The many recent crises in Belarus are often seen through the prism of democratization, post-communist transition, and nation- and identity-building. As a rule, it is put into the context of the 1989 democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and compared with similar societal mobilization in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004; 2014), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). This article, however, argues that while these theoretical approaches provide an important explanatory potential, they nevertheless fail to account for informal, hidden, and unstable processes presently unfolding in the Belarusian society, leading to profound change. We argue that, in the vulnerable, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world of today, our knowledge and ability to plan and achieve desirable outcomes are limited in contrast to a largely positivist or interpretivist epistemology of the mainstream theories, which conceive of the world as a closed system. In this article, we offer an alternative explanation of t...