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By Andrei Makhovsky
MINSK (Reuters) – Under President Alexander Lukashenko, the average monthly salary in Belarus increased from $50 in 1999 to $500. For voters, there is only one problem: it reached $500 in 2010 and has remained stagnant ever since.
While Lukashenko, a 65-year-old former collective farm manager and fond of a Soviet-style economy, seeks re-election on Sunday after 26 years in power, his economic record is inadequate through some voters.
“My daughter tells me all the time: I love my country, I need to live in my country,” said Dmitry, a 53-year-old Minsk resident protesting lukashenko last week.
“But with what’s here, there’s no prospect for young people. There is no future,” he said, stating that his daughter lived in the Czech Republic and had no intention of returning.
He refused to give his last call for retaliation in a country where little dissent is allowed.
Once described through Washington as “Europe’s last dictator,” Lukashenko controls the levers of force in this strategically vital country between East and West through which Russia sends its oil. He’ll be re-elected.
But he faces protests from opposition supporters gathering around his main opponent, a former English instructor whose husband has been imprisoned and ruled.
Lukashenko is criticized for his human rights record and COVID-19’s rejection as “a psychosis.”
His once-popular promise of “$500 for all” was a mirror image of the developing prosperity of the 2000s, yet it aims at Internet memes.
“People are fed up, other people need change, other people need some kind of development,” said Vadim Iossub, senior analyst at monetary company Alpari Eurasia.
The breakdown of ties between Belarus and Russia led Moscow to cut the subsidized energy materials that in the past supported Lukashenko’s reign, creating a $700 million budget vacuum as the coronavirus pandemic led the economy into recession.
Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have moved in recent years. Lukashenko said Tuesday that the population had fallen by 8%.
UN WRITTEN AGREEMENT
Approximately 70% of the economy and two-thirds of it remained in the hands of the state in the former Soviet republic.
While the government has reduced bureaucracy for personal entrepreneurs, which Lukashenko once called “blood demands,” the economy is governed by state-owned enterprises that obtain government loans and subsidies.
The style supported through reasonable russian crude oil and gas, processed in Belarusian refineries and exported.
Addressing the country on Tuesday, Lukashenko promised to double wages within five years and resisted immediate calls for change, making Belarus an island of stability at a time of global turmoil.
Lukashenko said he expected the economy to grow by 3 to 4 percent in the coming years. He said his state style allows production and exports to increase and Belarus begins manufacturing $4 billion worth of goods that it lasts every year.
“Throughout my presidency, I have discovered an answer to the question: why are state-owned enterprises so terrible for everyone?” He said.
Belarus grew on average to less than 1% according to the year between 2010 and 2020. In 2012, Belarus’s purchasing force pays 73% of that of neighboring Poland. By 2020, it had fallen to 60%, according to official data.
Valery Tsepkalo, an election opponent who fled for fear of arrest, told Reuters that Lukashenko had damaged an “unworn agreement” with the electorate to achieve some prosperity in exchange for political obedience.
“It has harmed other Belarusians of political freedoms and also deprives other Belarusians of economic growth. That’s one of the reasons society has to protest,” he said.
(Additional report through Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Moscow; written through Matthias Williams, edited through Andrew Osborn and Timothy Heritage)