Research · 28 March 2016
“Who Protests in Belarus, How, and Why”: An Article Based on Political Sphere’s Protest Monitoring
The website “Tomorrow of Your Country” (zautra.by) has published an article by Political Sphere staff member Tatsiana Chyzhova based on the results of monitoring protest activity carried out from 2013 to 2015.
Who Protests in Belarus, How, and Why
25.03.2016
Tatsiana Chyzhova, Political Sphere Institute
The absolute media hit was the march of Chinese workers from Dobrush to Homiel, while mass street actions shrank to pickets and performances.
Experts from the Political Sphere Institute conducted monitoring (https://palityka.org/2016/03/pratesty-i-vybary-vyniki-manitorynhu-pratestnaj-aktyunasci-u-bjelarusi-za-2015-h/) of protest activity among Belarusians.
Street protest according to the calendar
In 2015, 125 protest events took place in Belarus: 97 public (street) actions, usually with a political agenda and carried out by parties, organizations and political activists, and 28 related to social conflicts in the form of strikes by workers and entrepreneurs or residents’ struggles against developers.
In 2015, election marches and rallies began to resemble ritual opposition events: the electoral intensity did not produce any significant surge.
Yet previously, pre- and post-election protests in Belarus had always been able to bring together at least several thousand participants.
Among public street protest actions, the traditional core consisted of “calendar” opposition events (Freedom Day, the Chernobyl Way, the Declaration of Sovereignty, Dziady): 20-25 actions that are held steadily every year.
Why did protest not happen?
The 2015 election year only partly confirmed last year’s forecast (https://palityka.org/2015/03/protest-monitoring-2014/) of an increase in political street protest activity, which grew largely not only due to protests connected with the elections but also due to small actions organized by informal youth groups.
However, compared with the events of 2010, 2006 and even 2001, no real mass participation was observed during street actions.
Experts explain this primarily by problems among political actors: the opposition’s paths diverged. One part focused on the purely campaign-oriented “For Peaceful Change” campaign, conducted without protest energy and without calls to go to the square, while the other proved unable to gather large-scale street events.
Despite the economic crisis, the number of social conflicts in 2015 (housing, labor and entrepreneurial conflicts) not only did not increase but declined.
Entrepreneurs did not enter the political scene that season because of temporary legislative concessions, while “workers” have not been present on it since the legendary rallies of the early 1990s: in contemporary Belarusian politics, such an actor simply does not exist.
The agenda of actions
In 2015, small pickets and performances with between 1 and 10 participants accounted for almost half of all protests.
The exception was the opposition action against Russian air bases, held on 4 October last year and not “calendar-based” or directly connected with the electoral process (http://zautra.by/art.php?&sn_nid=19524).
Cross-cutting mainstream protest themes included political prisoners, human rights and anti-government rhetoric.
However, while in 2014 the Ukrainian issue was one of the leading themes at opposition actions (including events dedicated to calendar dates), in 2015 it was displaced by electoral, social and human-rights issues.
According to data from the Political Sphere Institute (https://palityka.org)
Who leads?
In the niche of small actions in 2015, youth non-party actors began to crowd out the traditional opposition.
In 2015, anarchists became the leaders in organizing performances and pickets (10 actions).
Although the main opposition parties remain the leading actors in street actions.
In 2013 these were the BPF Party and the Belarusian Christian Democracy, while in 2014 and 2015 leadership belonged to the United Civic Party (in most cases due to the active participation of the party leader himself in numerous pickets).
In the regions, the situational political agenda is expressed by traditional actors (old parties and NGOs adjacent to them).
Often in the regions, representation of organizations at a single small event is higher than the number of participants: the same activists may belong to a party, several organizations and initiatives.
According to data from the Political Sphere Institute (https://palityka.org)
Waves of social protest
After independent trade unions stopped being granted permission to hold a May Day rally under social slogans, there are simply no traditional “social” actions in Belarus.
This means that the number and scale of actions are much more variable, depending on the influence of situational factors.
Entrepreneurs’ protests provide a good example.
In 2013, small business was concerned about the adoption of the new technical regulation of the Customs Union, which placed them on the brink of survival.
This resulted in 18 large protest actions.
In 2014, the wave continued in the form of protest against the well-known Presidential Decree No. 222: 13 actions.
In March 2015, the head of state postponed the innovations for almost a year by another decree, and entrepreneurs stopped being agitated: only three noticeable actions took place in 2015.
However, on 1 January 2016 the postponement expired.
And since the beginning of this year alone, there have been more mass actions by entrepreneurs than during the entire previous year.
The only category of social actions that has formed a stable protest background in Belarus over the past several years has been protests against infill construction and the development of public-use areas by large business.
In 2013 there were 17 such actions, in 2014 there were 15, and last year there were 14.
This category of protest is highly diverse.
There was a successful hunger strike in Mahiliou (http://sputnik.by/society/20150518/1015276116.html), a fairly large residents’ rally (http://charter97.org/ru/news/2015/5/29/153396/) near the “gates of Minsk,” a dramatic and unsuccessful protest (http://charter97.org/ru/news/2015/4/8/146756/) by residents against the addition of upper floors to a building, and a spontaneous rally against the installation of a mobile operator’s tower (https://tech.onliner.by/2015/04/08/mts-167).
When there is no actor
As for labor conflicts, there were unexpectedly few of them last year against the background of the economic crisis: 10 compared with 18 a year earlier.
The absolute media hit was the march of Chinese workers from Dobrush to Homiel, against which the short strikes of workers in Maladzechna and machine operators in Khotsimsk seem somewhat lost.
Here it is necessary to take into account an important detail that distinguishes social protest, and the sector of labor conflicts in particular.
In most cases, the collective protest actor is not parties or NGOs, but citizens themselves or labor collectives.
This, of course, speaks in favor of “grassroots” initiatives and citizens’ capacity for self-organization, but it has a sharply negative effect on the information support and planning of actions.
Organizations capable of serving as the engine of protest have existed among entrepreneurs since the 1990s, while initiatives working with housing protests are emerging before our eyes.
Workers, however, do not have such structures: independent trade unions were pushed out of state enterprises quite long ago, and they never existed in the private sector.
Source: http://zautra.by/art.php?sn_nid=20965 (http://zautra.by/art.php?sn_nid=20965)