Uladzimir Matskevich: It is high time to replace selfish and short-sighted opposition leaders

The main reason for the continuing feud between supporters of the boycott and the parliamentary elections’ participation is the low political culture of the Belarusan opposition.

This opinion was expressed by the head of the Board of the International Consortium EuroBelarus, philosopher and methodologist Uladzimir Matskevich.

"In a more narrow sense, it is the ambitious, selfish, pursuing corporate interests leaders who are to blame; as they, even doing the same thing, do not want to recognize that others are also right, doing the same thing, but with a little time lag", said the expert.

Uladzimir Matskevich noted that "virtually all the leaders have currently come out for the boycott of the elections". "Even when the leaders of the campaign "Tell the Truth!" and Mikola Statkevich [a Belarusan politician, the chairman of the Belarusian Social Democratic Party (Hramada) since 1995 and presidential candidate at the 2010 election - EuroBelarus] are in favor of the consistent participation, the shooting the works this whole procedure, even so they only talk about the need not to miss every single minute for campaigning, working with people. But in essence, they all come out for the boycott. The question is, what has prevented them all from agreeing on this in advance?”, puts a question the philosopher.

In his opinion, "the thing that has prevented was that no one was willing to follow the leader". "The one, who will give the first idea, automatically becomes the leader. Therefore, everybody is seeing to it that no one passed ahead. And if someone manages to draw away, he must be cracked down or his actions must be recognized unlawful. As a result, everybody is marking time actually in the same positions, doing the same thing, just with different explanations, with different rationales, unwilling to surrender leadership, to make way for anybody else", stressed the methodologist.

The head of the EuroBelarus Board believes that in broad terms, the cause of quarrels within the opposition is that the "rank-and-file party members, activists, civil society representatives allow selfish, short-sighted, pursuing their own interests leaders to remain so". This means that the whole thing is the low political culture. "It is high time to replace these leaders", believes Uladzimir Matskevich.

The position of the supporters of the boycott, calling the OSCE observers to stop monitoring elections, is quite logical, in the philosopher’s view. "Another thing that it is unlikely to demand for this, it is still worth monitoring to the end. But, in principle, suggesting this version is fully justified as for the moment (and it has been so for quite a long time already) it is enough information to recognize the election, which will end in a week, to be void. Nothing will change in the rest 5-6 days; there will appear just additional facts, there will be additional violations, well, nothing new. But fixing the existing violations is enough to say that there is no election in the country", said the expert.

"Moreover, if the OSCE leadership was ready to make such a decision, I think it would be correct. But, being aware of the structure of the OSCE and the decision-making structure of the organization, I understand that such a decision can not be made. Still, it would have been a nice and good decision", said Uladzimir Matskevich.