Sixty-four Percent of Belarusians Planning to Vote in Local Elections

The March 2, 2003 local elections will be the first serious political campaign after the 2001 presidential election. They will become a barometer of the public sentiment and a test of forces of the leading political actors. To a certain extent, they will clarify the government's intentions. The poll results suggest a high turnout in the local elections. Table 1 shows that today, at an early stage in the election campaign, nearly two in three of the respondents are going to vote in the elections for local soviets (councils).

Table 1. Are you going to vote in the elections for local soviets?

BelaPAN's comment: All the figures refer to percent. The decimals were omitted as having a negligible effect on the total.
*The option was absent from the poll.

Taking into account the impact of electioneering, the upcoming spring is likely to be marked by a very high voter activity. However, not having enough information about candidates and their programs and often unwilling to find such information, many voters make their choice depending on the candidate's attitude to Belarusian leader, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, and his policies. The poll revealed no changes in the impact of the candidates' party membership on the voters' choice. The party affiliation remains a secondary factor (see Table 2).

Table 2. Voters' support of candidates representing political parties

*The poll was held before the change in Nadzeya's leadership
** The option was absent from the poll.

The low rating of potential candidates representing political parties can be accounted for by natural factors, such as a negative and sometimes an openly hostile attitude of the government, lack of finances to develop party networks, and a low political awareness of the population, as well as by manageable factors. The latter include splits in a number of major parties stemming from personal conflicts between the leaders, a weakening of the opposition's consolidation that was achieved during the presidential campaign, etc.

The government is apparently not going to change its approaches to elections. The fact that few representatives of non-governmental organizations and opposition parties were selected to local and district election commissions undoubtedly influenced the respondents' attitude to the credibility of the future voting results. The number of those who believed that the officially announced voting results would be authentic and those who doubted it split almost evenly (Table 3).

Table 3. Do you think the officially announced voting results will be authentic?

Seventy percent of those interviewed said their confidence in the voting results would have been higher if election commissions included representatives of all political forces (Table 4).

Table 4. Many Belarusians have no confidence in the voting results because there are no opposition representatives on the election commissions. Do you share this opinion?

Despite the respondents' overwhelming readiness to go to the polls in the local elections, only slightly more than 25 percent advocate the expanding of the local soviets' powers, which are currently very limited (Table 5).

Table 5. Do you think powers of local soviets should be expanded?

Paradoxically, the voters accept that local authorities should have limited powers. It is hard to say whether this attitude should be attributed to the traditional distrust in local authorities and representative bodies in general or to the rejection of the very idea of local self-government. Anyway, their intention to go to the polls is a encouraging sign of a gradual development of democratic culture.