Telepolis: “Summer sale in the ‘last dictatorship in Europe’”

“The Belarusian authorities speed up their ambitious privatization programme while in the mean time the authoritarian state structure remains untouched”, wrote the German analytical internet source Telepolis.

“In the course of the past months the Belarusian authorities shifted radically towards economic reforms… In the meantime Belarus remains the only post-Soviet country with the dominating state-ownership on property form of the economy and where there are no Russia-like oligarchs, who emerged from the ‘wild’ privatization, at all. The part of the private sector in the National Gross Product of this Easter-European country comprises around 25 % and the property ownership of the most wealthy Belarusians is measured in Millions rather than Billions of US Dollars”.

The German Medium writes, that “Belarusian government is assuring that the process of privatization will be conducted gradually and orderly which is deemed to prevent from the wild and unpredictable privatization”. In their turn, “directors of Belarusian enterprises fear that Russian capitalists will buy up everything inside the country”.

At the same time, the Kremlin regards Belarus with its current significant financial dependence on Moscow as a province of Russia and hopes for ‘Union’ at the end however German analysts think that Lukashenko, in reverse, is eager to prevent this scenario from happening. Therefore Telepolis writes, that “Western capital also has pretty good chances for developing this last post-Soviet ‘terra incognita’ in the Eastern Europe”. It is important for the Belarusian authorities to attract Western investors to counterbalance the Russian influence.

The German Telepolis considers that “capitalism can co-exist with the authoritarian regime to the full extent”. Similar situation could be observed in China and a number of other countries. Indeed, the most defected from the delayed transformation of the system will be, again, the population, which may already prepare itself for the process of mass pauperization in Belarus.