🇧🇾🇱🇰Election Round-Up: Belarus, Sri Lanka
🇧🇾🇱🇰Election Round-Up: Belarus, Sri Lanka
Hello! Welcome to another election edition of Inside The Newsroom, where we’ll dissect what went down in Belarus and Sri Lanka this week. Europe’s “last dictatorship” showed no signs of being toppled, though mass protests and violence have thrown a new wrinkle into the 26-year reign of the ruling regime. And Sri Lanka’s most famous family gained unwavering power and now hold both the presidency and prime ministership. Before we get into it, I’d love to know if anyone has been successful in finding a job or interview from the job board. If you have, get in touch with me at daniellevitt32@gmail.com 🙂. Okay, let’s do this thing! ✊
Deadlines this week include the Associated Press, Archant, Fourth Estate Alliance, the Oxford Mail, Proxy Insight and the World Resources Institute (today!)…
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2020 Elections So Far
July: Mongolia, Iceland 🇲🇳🇮🇸, Croatia, Dominican Republic 🇭🇷🇩🇴 and Syria, North Macedonia 🇸🇾🇲🇰
June: Serbia, Kiribati and Malawi 🇷🇸🇰🇮🇲🇼
May: Burundi 🇧🇮 and Suriname 🇸🇷
April: South Korea 🇰🇷
March: Israel, Slovakia and Tajikistan 🇮🇱🇸🇰🇹🇯
February: Cameroon, Ireland, Azerbaijan 🇨🇲🇮🇪🇦🇿 and Iran, Togo 🇮🇷🇹🇬
January: Taiwan 🇹🇼 and Peru 🇵🇪
Belarus: Violent protests follow disputed results
Sunday’s landslide election has resulted in violent protests, which have killed at least one person and injured dozens. The violence comes after the election commission announced incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko had won a sixth straight term with 80 percent of the vote, of which many international observers have declared fraudulent. Lukashenko is the country’s first and only president and the result will extend his 26-year reign over the country. The main opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya challenged the legitimacy of the poll and refused to accept the results, and she has since fled to Lithuania after two videos of her speaking have emerged. The election took place amid declining Covid-19 cases.
In one of the videos, Tikhanovskaya is reportedly reading off a script inside Belarus’ electoral commission after she initially went there to complain about the result, but was subsequently detained for several hours according to the BBC and BuzzFeed correspondent Christopher Miller. The second video shows Tikhanovskaya speaking from Lithuania, confirmed by the country’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius.
What Next For Belarus?
Lukashenko has been described as Europe’s last dictator, overseeing a surveillance state comparable to China. For journalists, it’s no different: Belarus is among the most oppressive countries for journalism in Europe, on par with the likes of Russia and Turkey, according to the 2020 World Press Freedom Index. Protesting and criticism of the government are seen as criminal offenses, though an increasing amount of independent media is finding ways of breaking through the media blackout.
While civil unrest continues to dominate the headlines inside Belarus, the country has other problems outside. Ever since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus has had a fraught relationship with its eastern neighbour Russia, and the political and economic tension between the two promises to continue. At the heart of the dispute is the Union State treaty, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations, which was signed in 1999 and stipulated that the two countries would seek to unify most economic and social policies, going as far as sharing a single currency and constitution, while remaining completely sovereign.
But after Lukashenko witnessed Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the relationship between Belarus and Russia has increasingly soured. For the first three months of 2020, Russia refused to deliver oil to its neighbour, only agreeing to supply a limited amount in April. And in a further twist to the relationship, Belarus has since turned to Russia’s arch-enemy the U.S. for oil for the first time, a stark message to Putin. The region is certainly one to watch in the coming months…
Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa brothers tighten grip on power
Sri Lanka’s Podujana Peramuna party (SLPP) won 145 of the 225 seats in parliament, an increase of 50 from 2015. With the help of a small number of allies, the SLPP will have a supermajority. The Samagi Jana Balawegaya alliance (SJB) finished in second with 54 seats in its first election since being formed in February. The SLPP, formerly known as the Sri Lanka National Front and then later Our Sri Lanka Freedom Front, is led by president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who won the presidency last year and who has already sworn in his brother, Mahinda, as prime minister (more on that later). The brothers’ super majority will allow them to fulfil their campaign promise to amend the constitution and assert full control over the island’s long-term future.
Source 👆
What Next for Sri Lanka?
The Rajapaksa family is one of the most powerful in Sri Lanka’s history, which makes it perfect for a quick history lesson! Buckle up… Current president Gotabaya Rajapaksae is widely-credited for being responsible for defeating the Tamil separatists in 2009 as defence minister, a conflict that lasted more than 25 years and claimed around 100,000 lives. During that time, Mahinda served as president between 2005 and 2015, after briefly serving as prime minister from 2004 to 2005. The brothers’ father served as a member of parliament and cabinet minister, while another two brothers held high-ranking positions in previous administrations. Meanwhile the UN has accused Gotabaya and Mahinda of atrocities toward the end of the civil war, accusing the brothers of killing Tamil fighters after they surrendered with white flags, something they both deny.
Moving forward, the Rajapaksae brothers will now look to undo parts of the constitution set up by the previous government, likely starting with the current two-term presidential limit. The economic incompetence of the previous government has meant that Sri Lanka has increasingly relied on China for financial stability — in 2018 Sri Lanka “coughed” up a port to China — and national security after the Easter Bombings killed 269 people in April of last year. The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit the island hard initially but has since declined in recent weeks, will leave many countries in economic turmoil, and many like Sri Lanka could turn to China for help, significantly increasing the regime’s influence outside its own borders.