This article provides an assessment of the relevant EU documents pertinent to the restrictive measures against Lukashenka’s regime after the 2020 fraudulent presidential elections in Belarus and since the beginning of 2022 Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The text identifies relevant concepts and provides their contextual analysis vis-à-vis their linkage with Belarus in general, its society and Lukashenka’s regime. The article reveals that Belarus did not become a priority of the EU and its pre-war critical engagement policy failed to contribute to the development of a unified EU-wide vocabulary addressing the Belarusian case. With the start of the war, it was internationalised and placed within a binarity “victim of aggression – (co-)aggressor” with little evidence of an unequivocal shift towards a primary focus on the contextual interpretation of the domestic developments in Belarus.ts in Belarus.
In August 2020, the presidential election took place in Belarus, followed by unprecedented mass protests due to apparent election fraud. Aliaksandr Lukashenka, the country’s long-term authoritarian leader, faced the biggest electoral challenge since his first election in 1994. This article analyzes his official rhetoric during the campaign and after the election focusing on the image of the society. For this purpose, discourse-historical approach is applied to understand his political vision of the developments in Belarus and to explore changes in his rhetoric caused by the unprecedented challenge to his power. The research demonstrates that Lukashenka acts as a classical authoritarian ruler with respective discursive strategies. The text shows that he adopted the imaginary role of Belarus’s strict father, who has assumed full responsibility for its fate and offensively reacts to every challenger of this role. It also reveals that Lukashenka sees his personal contract with the Belarusian society as a stable and durable instrument that does not require changes and per se implies his personal engagement as a party to it. Finally, the analysis of Lukashenka’s rhetoric in 2020 suggests that a voluntary transition of power in Belarus remains rather wishful thinking.
Belarus is also an ‘in-betweener’ country apparently caught between the choice of EU and Russia. Kiryl Kascian, however, shows that this is not a choice which the Belarusian authorities wish to make - they instead seek a relationship with both the EU and Russia. Belarus provides perhaps the starkest example of the limitations of the EU’s values-based approach to its neighbours. Belarus’ domestic political system and its prioritisation of the relationship with Russia mean that the EU lacks any real impact. Belarus does, however, seek a more pragmatic, interest-based relationship in contrast to the EU’s values-based approach which appears to be going nowhere. The chapter also raises the problems of the perception of European identity promoted through EU-isation. While Belarus considers itself European and at the centre of a wider Europe, EU-isation, as it is currently configured, relegates it to the periphery. This theme of differing perceptions of European identity and the consequences of the narrow application of EU-isation recurs across the chapters and will be re-addressed in the conclusion of this volume.
The article analyzes the capacities and channels of Lithuania's minority representation in the European Parliament. Possible minority representation can potentially be achieved through representation of minorities in the electoral lists of Lithuania's mainstream parties or by self-organization around minority coalition led by the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance (EAPL-CFA). However, these two channels demonstrate two different outcomes. First, the article discusses the role of minority representatives in the mainstream parties focusing on the cases of Viktor Uspaskich and Leonidas Donskis. It is followed by the analysis of the electoral performances of the EAPL-CFA with the emphasis on the party’s general political capacities, abilities to keep its current and attract the new electorate, and the leadership issues taking into account personalistic factors and a series of scandals that happened in 2018 and involved the leadership of the Union of Poles in Lithuania.
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