October 2008
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Lukashenka has long performed two simultaneous balancing acts. In domestic policy he has varied the degree of authoritarianism to pre-empt any challenge to his rule while maintaining the populist image of a benign ‘batka’. In foreign policy he has developed a ‘Titoist’ game of playing Russia off against the West – or, more exactly, of making periodic and secondary overtures to the West to secure the maximum gains in the primary game with Russia. More recently he has added a third balancing act: maintaining the welfare populism turned consumerism that is his key ‘social contract’ with the nation, while trying to partially accommodate the growing pressures for nomenklatura privatisation. Despite his one-time job as a chicken farmer and image in some quarters as a brutish hick, Lukashenka has actually been quite successful in parleying his limited resources in these three strategies. The key question about the recent elections therefore must be the following: are they just the latest recalibration of these various balancing acts, or do they mark a more fundamental shift in the nature of the regime?
Luka the Chameleon
Lukashenka survived the Yeltsin era with ease. Relations with Putin were initially more difficult, but the Orange Revolution gave him a second lease of life as Belarus became Russia’s laboratory for ‘counter-revolutionary technology’ in 2005-06. Three powerful pressures have built up in his third term, since 2006, however. First, Russia has recalibrated the price of its support. It has not ended the subsidies regime, but it has made its financial and other support more conditional. The speed with which Russia moved to raise gas prices and win 50% of Beltransgaz as soon as the March 2006 elections were out of the way was a real shock in Minsk – as it was intended to be. Lukashenka’s links with the likes of Sergei Ivanov and Igor Sechin (through past oil deals) have also proved a double-edged sword under the new Putin-Medvedev tandem.
Second, the EU has belatedly begun to rethink its Belarusian policy. Brussels was under no real pressure from member states to change its isolationist approach between 1997 and roughly 2004. After enlargement, Poland made the running in setting strategy towards Belarus for the 2006 election; but now realises that its one-shot policy of pushing Milinkevich was counter-productive, allowing Lukashenka the propaganda gift of a ‘Polish plot’. Lithuania was tempted to promote a coloured revolution in Minsk in 2006, which also played into Lukashenka’s hands; but Vilnius has also since become more pragmatic. By 2007-08, moreover, Poland and Lithuania were joined by other new member states and some older members such as Sweden in pushing for a strategic review of Belarus policy. Kwaśniewski’s Belarus Task Force has played a key role in this process.
Third, the balance has shifted within the Belarusian elite from the ‘siloviki’, who were essential to Lukashenka’s survival in 2006, to the ‘technocrats’ who would like to enrich themselves via nomenklatura privatisation; although it is not yet clear whether this is primarily a political change – due to the purge of pro-Russian siloviki and/or the rise of Viktar Lukashenka - or an economic development. Long-term resource problems are clearly building up, but short-term GDP growth, still strong at 8% in 2007, and the state’s fiscal position are currently holding up reasonably well - though Belarus’s accounts are not exactly full and transparent.
Belarus has ‘Siloviki Wars’ Too
The internal pressures produced by these multiple balancing acts were already apparent during Belarus’s equivalent of Russia’s ‘siloviki wars’ in the summer of 2007. As in Russia during the 2007-08 election cycle, there was a simultaneous clan struggle for power and economic assets. The extraordinary public beating of Zianon Lomat, head of the State Control Committee, in July 2007 coincided with management purges at Belneftekhim in May 2007 and Beltransgaz and the Belarusian Oil Company in July. The fall of KGB chief Stsiapan Sukharenka after the attack on Lomat was the first sign of the waning influence of the strange coalition of interests around Viktar Sheiman, representing certain Russian oligarchs and the domestic oil business as much as a hard line in domestic affairs.
This was confirmed by Sheiman’s dismissal after the even more bizarre affair of the July 2008 Minsk bombings, along with his ally Hennadz Niavyhlas from his position as head of the Presidential Administration. The removal of Sheiman, Lukashenka’s long-term number two, was a dramatic and potentially risky step, as he knows where many bodies are buried – both literally, given his role in the 1999-2000 ‘disappearancess’, and metaphorically, as he has long been at the centre of the local web of kompromat (not to mention the ‘Liozna incident’, the fake attempt on Lukashenka’s life apparently staged by Sheiman in 1994). (...)
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