Andrei Yahorau: No need to hang on Russia’s every word

Using in Belarus a mechanism similar to elections of the Coordinating Council of Russian opposition, can yield certain results, but only as promotion measure, publicity campaign or new leaders’ brand.

This opinion was pronounced by director of the Centre for European Transformation, political analyst Andrei Yahorau in a conversation with the EuroBelarus Information Service.

In his view, the above-mentioned Russian model is not intended to identify the real political influence in society, but may be used only for fulfillment of a certain preliminary task.

"As the Belarusan experience shows, being far ahead as to the Russian situation, such kinds of systems don’t contribute to promote real leaders. Here, examples may be cited as of alternative elections in 1999, as well as various versions of the primaries, Congresses of Democratic Forces", noted EuroBelarus’ interlocutor.

"Often these quasi-election mechanisms under authoritarian systems lead to imposing more restrictions on the real competition, tying joint candidates with completely unnecessary obligations to fictitious, not real structures, thus limiting the possibility of political action. Therefore, there’s need, rather, to focus not on quasi-election mechanism, but on promoting dialogue, public conflicts of interest, real competition between alternative public leaders”, says Andrei Yahorau.

He notes that "the Russian experience is irrelevant for the Belarusan system, because Russia is somewhere in 1999 or 1996 years towards Belarus". "And our situation is radically different from Russia. One can rather use the Belarusan model in order to understand what is happening in Russia, and analyze their mistakes on the basis of our experience, rather than vice versa. No need to hang on Russia’s every word, because we are pretty much ahead of the processes, currently going on in Russia", stresses the analyst.

The issue of forming a single mechanism for identifying a leader in the opposition, in his opinion, is "to overcome the internal differences between the leaders and the ability of their rejection of private, selfish interests in favor of the common interests of the country, development of the democratic movement as a whole". “For the present, what is going on within the Belarusan political opposition and the democratic community, does not look promising", admitted Andrei Yahorau.

Ideally, the behavior of political leaders would have to influence the rank and file activists. "But the thing is that, to a large extent, ordinary activists are dependent on the central structures, particularly with regard to Belarusan political parties and movements. Here, they are not accountable to the subordinate structures, so rank and file activists’ impact on the leaders is extremely low. And this situation also needs to be changed by redefining the relationships", said the expert.

"We also see that the political leaders do not focus at all even on their nearest supporters, whose interests they are, actually, to defend. Rather, they move counter, increasing confrontation with civil society than trying to represent their interests and focus on their opinions and decisions. There are only few exceptions, - the interaction of the "Tell the Truth" campaign, the Movement "For Freedom" and the National Platform of the Civil Society", noted Andrei Yahorau.