Belarus holds local elections ... Soviet-style

RFE/RL Newsline

MIENSK - Belarus held local elections on April 4, with 26,883 candidates running for 24,524 seats on city and village councils. The elections were boycotted by major opposition parties whose leading activists have been de facto barred from taking part in the race by a decree issued by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

"Some 90 percent of constituencies have only one candidate, like in Soviet times," Yury Khadyka of the opposition Belarusian Popular Front told Reuters. According to preliminary data provided by the Central Election Commission on April 5, the election turnout was 66.3 percent.

Hans-Georg Wieck, head of the OSCE mission in Miensk, said on April 5 that the local election law in Belarus "cannot provide for a free and fair election process." According to Mr. Wieck, President Lukashenka has "changed the character of elections from a democratically organized, competitive event ... to an event characterized by the interest of the state in organizing political support for its institutions and leaders."

Mr. Wieck denied that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent its official observers to watch the elections, saying that his mission had monitored the vote as part of its regular work in studying human rights in Belarus.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 11, 1999, No. 15, Vol. LXVII

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