ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explain the trajectory of post-communist political development in Belarus. The country terminated its move towards democracy as a result of the November 1996 constitutional referendum, carried out, ironically, at the initiative of its first democratically elected President, Aliaksandr Lukashenka. A new version of the constitution entrusted the President with effective control over all the institutions of authority, including the judiciary, local governments, and even the legislature. Post-referendum Belarus fails to comply with minimal democratic criteria.1 Thus, the right of the people to elect the government in free and fair elections has been infringed by the dissolution of an elected parliament and its replacement with a hand-picked legislature, and the concomitant political rights and civil liberties have become subject to systematic attacks by the government. The undemocratic nature of the Belarusian government has been recognised by the international community.2 Unlike some of the countries in the former USSR (especially the Central Asian countries) that also witnessed the emergence of a system of ‘unlimited presidential power’,3 Belarus did not experience a direct transition from the Soviet to a post-Soviet dictatorship. In between, the country went through a period of extensive political liberalisation,4 which was reversed by an outsider whose very rise to power would not have been possible under the old system. An explanation of post-communist political development in Belarus should therefore account for the factors and events that have influenced its transformation in the last decade, rather than being exclusively focused on the legacies of the Soviet past or of even earlier historical periods.
