The State of Denial Amidst a Military Parade: COVID-19 in Belarus

By mid-May 2020, the nexus between the state of democracy and rule of law, and the ways countries are grappling with COVID-19 has crystalized so vividly (including in the impressive array of essays on Verfassungsblog) that it is almost trivial to expect repressive legal twists from a clearly authoritarian state granted extra emergency powers. In the end, the current spread of the pandemic is the result of rather irresponsible (if not outright illegal) tactics by the world’s most populated authoritarian regime, the People’s Republic of China. The latter has nonetheless introduced lockdowns and state-controlled quarantine measures. In this regard, the authoritarian government of Belarus stands out somewhat paradoxically. Órban’s Hungary and neighbouring Poland (about the ‘Belarusisation of the rule of law’ in these EU countries, see here, here and here) have instrumentalized quarantine and the threat of pandemic for the sake of their autocratic opportunism. In contrast, Łukašenka’s Belarus has chosen a path of semi-denialism, somewhat comparable to the rhetoric of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Along with Sweden, Belarus remains the only European country without a state-imposed quarantine. Schools, sport competitions, hairdressers, restaurants and cinemas have all been functioning as normal in the same period when each of its six neighboring states (including Putin’s Russia) have introduced strict quarantine measures or even lockdowns. The President, Aliaksandr Łukašenka, who has been in power for a quarter of a century, has repeatedly denied the scope and seriousness of the pandemic. Amongst Łukašenka’s extravagant “recommended remedies” for Belarusian citizens against COVID-19 are playing hockey, slaying the virus with vodka, going to the sauna and working on tractors in the harvest fields. The apogee of this mocking denialist politics has been the pompous military parade in Minsk on 9 May 2020, commemorating the 75th anniversary of victory over the Nazi Germany. The event involved thousands of people, including soldiers, veterans, state officials and general spectators on the streets of the Belarusian capital.