Ministers - victims of protest

Lukashenko changed the government, the security forces remained in place

For the first time, Alexander Lukashenko spoke about the future resignation of the government on May 25. Repeated - May 29. And on June 3, the office of Sergei Rumas really resigned. On June 4, the name of the new Prime Minister became known. Roman Golovchenko, former head of the State Military Industrial Committee.

Golovchenko 47 years old. He graduated from MGIMO, then - the Academy of Management in Belarus. He worked in the Security Council, the Prosecutor General, the Presidential Administration, the Ambassador to the UAE, then in the State Veenprom. In general, the career is semi -strong, semi -diolomatic, semi -controlled.

It is curious that in the Council of People's Commissars, the administration and the Prosecutor General’s Office, he worked precisely in those periods when these departments were headed by Viktor Sheiman, the Silovik closest to Lukashenko, who is suspected of organizing the abductions and murders of political opponents of the current government.

Alexander Lukashenko also replaced Deputy Prime Ministers, Ministers of Industry, Economics, Finance, Architecture and Construction, Information, Housing and Public Utilities and Chairmen of State Property Management and State Control. During the meeting on June 4, when the ministers were appointed ministers, he said that the new composition of the government was formed for six months and that nothing revolutionary happened - the government is allegedly always changing before the elections, since voters should see who they vote for.

Here, however, he made a mistake or lied: before he did not resign anyone before the election.

And as for the voter, the flickering of ministers two months before the elections is more likely to disorient him than to convince of stability and well -being. So it's different.

Of course, there could be no discussions of new candidates within six months. But coronavirus intervened, lying statistics, a complete neglect of the health of the nation (everyone remembers Lukashenko’s advice to be treated with vodka and tractor) and, as a result, a sharp increase in protest moods, and those who preferred not to notice what was happening for 20 years.

But it is one thing - political repressions, when the shells fall far, and a completely different thing is an epidemic that affected everyone as a war.

Even with official underestimated numbers, nine-million Belarus in 23rd place in the world-with a small lag behind the Netherlands, whose population is twice as much. Each Belarusian has a friend, brother, matchmaker, a neighbor necessarily either fell ill or died, or in intensive care. And the demonstrative denial of what was happening caused an unexpected reaction for Alexander Lukashenko: people go to the pickets to collect signatures and sign “against Lukashenko” thousands.

The nickname "Sasha is three percent" and the slogan "Stop, cockroach!" - Offensive, funny and contemptuous. This is not a majestic and frighteningly sounding "last dictator of Europe."

The repressions were not long in coming-the popular blogger Sergei Tikhonovsky, the head of the initiative group of his wife Svetlana (the blogger was not registered, because at the time of submission of documents he served a 15-day arrest in the CEC), detained on May 29 at the collection picket, is already in pre-trial detention center No. 1 of Minsk. On June 3, he had three searches at his place.

The first and second groups of investigators and operatives found anything, but the third arrived at night and immediately presented a bag of money - 900 thousand dollars. It seems that the accusation of bodily harm is not too interesting to the policeman, and the article is not serious enough.

But financing from the outside for destabilization and riots is a familiar story, we already passed it in 2010, when all presidential candidates were arrested one day.

If anything was prepared seriously, it is a “expanded package” of repression, and not a change of government at all.

It is not for nothing that Alexander Lukashenko, during a meeting with the new ministers, recalled how "my friend Rahmon with a machine gun at the ready entered the capital of Tajikistan in order to restore order." And Karimova mentioned in the same context: “They forgot how the former president Karimov in Andijan suppressed the putsch, having shot thousands of people? Everyone condemned him, but when he died, they stood on their knees, sobbed, cried. We did not survive this, so we do not want to understand this. Some. Well, we will remind! "

So the change of government is not that in today's situation it has at least some meaning. Lukashenko simply tried to demonstrate that he controlled at least ministers. Moreover, all the security forces remained in place, namely, on them he has his last hopes.