EU poised to extend sanctions against Belarus after elections

Poll unlikely to meet international standards.

The European Union will be watching parliamentary elections in Belarus on Sunday (23 September) with a sense of uncertainty about how to adjust its policy towards its eastern neighbour after another year of clashes with the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. 

The result is a foregone conclusion – a victory for supporters of Lukashenka, Belarus’s ruler since 1994 – and the 250 or so observers deployed by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) are almost bound to conclude that the election did not meet international standards.

The EU is likely to attach greater importance to what happens after the vote. Previous elections have been followed by large demonstrations, police crackdowns and a variety of forms of repression.

So far, the mood is quiet. In its interim report, on Friday (14 September), the OSCE noted that there are “few signs that elections are taking place”, and turnout is likely to be depressed by a boycott by the two main opposition parties, a call made partly in protest at the exclusion of many candidates on technical grounds. Oleg Manayev, a sociologist, has said it is “unrealistic” to think the elections will bring opponents out “en masse on the square”.

But Olga Shumylo-Tapiola of the think-tank Carnegie Europe, pointing to the ongoing protests in Russia, said that calm on the streets cannot be guaranteed.

The government is “clearly nervous”, she said, citing the detention of some protesters and foreign journalists on Tuesday (18 September).

How bad the government’s conduct is will have an impact on whether the EU decides to enlarge its sanctions against Belarus when they come up for review in October.

National interests may complicate the sanctions debate – in February, Slovenia saved a Belarusian investor from being blacklisted – but the broader question is how the EU and Belarus intend to improve relations from their current low.

Expulsions

In February, member states temporarily withdrew their ambassadors en masse from Minsk after the Belarusian authorities expelled the Polish and EU envoys because of an extension of sanctions. In August, they convened an extraordinary meeting after Belarus expelled Sweden’s diplomats, and each delivered diplomatic notes to Belarus.

Belarus’s decision has been widely attributed to an incident on 4 July when a Swedish public-relations firm flew into Belarus to drop teddy bears carrying pro-democracy messages.

The EU’s decision not to recall its ambassadors then was, in the view of Shumylo-Tapiola, a signal to Minsk that it wanted to avoid a vicious circle, as well as reflecting a desire to maintain lines of information ahead of the elections. “To be part of a vicious circle is a sign of impotence,” she said.

Member states are in waiting mode, believing that Belarus should make the next move. Some analysts viewed Lukashenka’s appointment of a new foreign minister, Uladzimir Makey, on 20 August as a signal that he wanted to end the ‘teddy bear’ crisis, even though Makey has long been close to Lukashenka.

However, it ignored an EU request to release nine political prisoners on its Independence Day, 3 July, and it has not resolved its stand-off with Sweden.

Sanctions list

So, with no clear indication that Belarus wants to move forward, the EU’s post-election debate is likely to focus on whether names should be added to the 243 on the blacklist (32 companies also feature). Makey himself will be an issue, as – unlike his predecessor, Siarhey Martynov – he is on the list of those barred from the EU.

If it wants, the EU could grant Makey ad hoc exemptions to meet EU officials, a procedure that requires the approval of a qualified majority of member states.

Member states are, some suggest, struggling to find new policy ideas and, in the meantime, are focused on consensus. The pressure for fresh ideas will, though, grow as the EU heads towards the next summit with the six members of the Eastern Partnership – of which Belarus is a member – in the second half of next year, when Belarus’s neighbour, Lithuania, holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The most recent initiative came from the European Commission, which in March launched the ‘European dialogue for modernisation’, seen as an attempt to reach out to more sections of Belarusian society. However, Dzianis Melyantsou of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think-tank, has argued that the dialogue needs to be stepped up substantially, and to include – even if informally – experts from the Belarusian government.

For the time being, though, sanctions remain the focus of debate, as they have for most of the years since the first sanctions were imposed in 1996.

The Brussels office of the Office for a Democratic Belarus (ODR) was burgled on Tuesday. The motive and the culprits remain unknown. The burglar managed to get through several locked doors and specifically targeted the fourth-floor office of the ODR on Square de Meeûs.

One old computer was stolen and several were tampered with. The electronic record of entries to the building was also deleted. The offices of other organisations in the building were not affected.

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