While Belarus will not have its Euromaidan any time soon, recent developments at home and abroad suggest that the country’s political course is not set in stone.
In mid-March, Belarus’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, announced that he would suspend his decree introducing the so-called “parasite tax”; a fee charged on the unemployed. Lukashenko, who has been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, is not used to making concessions, but unfavourable circumstances have left him with no choice. The recent wave of popular protests, on an unprecedented scale (which, in the Belarusian standards, means 23,000), is only one of them.
In 2016, the Belarusian economy regressed …read more
Source: Emerging Europe